I can't think of a single one of my plays that does not represent a coincidence between an external and an internal event. Something outside of me, outside even my own life, something I read in a newspaper or witness on the street, something I see or hear, fascinates me. I see it for its dramatic potential.

Athol Fugard

Categorized in : Thinking Play Events

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

Athol Fugard

anger inspiration love

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out and reinvent yourself.

Athol Fugard

finding-yourself shadow boxing

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

Athol Fugard

sabotage violence answers

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.

Athol Fugard

fascination theatre people

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.

Athol Fugard

disappointment writing thinking

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Athol Fugard

cancer different stories

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

Athol Fugard

theatre color men

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.

Athol Fugard

rocks miracle men

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.

Athol Fugard

void danger men

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.

Athol Fugard

done realization white

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

Athol Fugard

diversity suffering justice

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

Athol Fugard

fool life-is people

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.

Athol Fugard

kind play writing

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

Athol Fugard

obligation witness bears

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

Athol Fugard

role-models boys kids

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

Athol Fugard

film different way

How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.

Athol Fugard

dark writing beach

You cant legislate into existence an act of forgiveness and a true confession; those are mysteries of the human heart, and they occur between one individual and another individual, not a panel of judges sitting asking questions, trying to test your truth.

Athol Fugard

asking-questions judging heart

I'm giving up acting. . . . I'm 66 and there are a number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus - almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write.

Athol Fugard

giving-up writing lying

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

Athol Fugard

white writing thinking