Quotes from Athol Fugard

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.

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

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

Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.

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

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

Obviously when it comes to the question of telling stories about other people's lives in a situation as political as South Africa, you get to be political.

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.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

You can't 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right?...Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it?

Yes! That's what all our talk about a decent world has been... just so much bullshit." "We did say it was still only a dream." "And a bloody useless one at that. Life's a fuck-up and it's never going to change.

we're bumping into each other all the time...

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.

Every African soul is either carrying a bundle or in it. What is wrong with this world that it wants to waste you like that ... my children ... my Africa!

Aman cant spend his life with only one thought