Athol Fugard Quotes

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

You can't answer violence with counter violence ... The answer is love. The best sabotage is love.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

For you in the West to hear the phrase 'All men are created equal' is to draw a yawn. For us, it's a miracle. We're starting out at rock bottom, man. But South Africa does have soul.

If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along.

Without white South Africa realizing what it had done - and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness - there can really be no significant movement.

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

Life is just a plain bloody mess, that's all. And people are fools.

Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground.

I've always sensed for myself an obligation to bear witness to my time.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

I think the aloe is one of South Africa's most powerful, beautiful and celebratory symbols. It survives out there in the wild when everything else is dried.

Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.

The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.

I'm always in disguise in one form or another in my plays.

In South Africa, success never presented the problems that it presents in New York. In New York, if you happen to be the flavor of the month, a lot of nonsense comes with it into your life.

A very close friend of mine keeps reminding me that since about the age of 50, I've been saying, 'I'm finished. I haven't got another one in me.' But somehow you do.

My essential identity is that of a writer.

Nobody can take what I love away from me. I would like to believe that love is the only energy I've ever used as a writer. I've never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life.

It's just that life felt the right size in there... not too big and not too small. Wasn't so hard to work up a bit of courage. It's got so bloody complicated since then.

Be careful, Hally.""Of what? The truth? I seem to be the only one around here who is prepared to face it.