Lynn Nottage

“I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.”

“Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.”

“My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters.”

“In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.”

“When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.”

“I think of myself as a healing artist.”

“Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.”

“The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.”

“Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.”

“By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.”

“Replace judgment with curiosity.”

“Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.”

“I try to be led by my curiosity.”

“I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.”

“We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It's the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back.”

“It's very easy, when we're reading those articles on the 20th page of 'The New York Times,' to distance ourselves and say, 'It's someone else.'”

“If you're looking at the people who head the institutions, there are very few African Americans or people of colour. I'm talking about the major theatres that position themselves as serving all audiences. What you find is, by and large, people who are shaping what we see, and the people who are the tastemakers are white.”

“The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.”

“A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'”

“If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.”