Amelie Nothomb's Quotes

Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.

You cannot always make such big exhibitions, because they consume too much time and energy.

I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case.

I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until I finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

One often thinks that using 2 different things like visual and sound lead to 2 different conclusions - to a different content - but in in my case it is all one.

Some things can be perfectly expressed by sound alone and images would only be disturbing. Other times, sound would be possible, but visuals are much stronger and closer to what I want to express and then again, they sometimes overlap perfectly.

The subject of my work has a lot to do with general, artistic matters, questions like: What is creativity? Where do we come from? What are our motors? What is coincidence? What is logic?

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

I'm a schizophrenic writer.

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

My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends.

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

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry's career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.

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.

I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has ever had in that particular space, and yet we couldn't find a home on Broadway.

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.