Fugard Quotes

#1. I recently did a play, Athol Fugard's 'Coming Home' at Long Wharf Theatre, where I played one character throughout - I sat at a table and didn't have any costume changes. Following one character's arc from beginning to end is a whole different mindset.

Colman Domingo

#2. Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.

Gavin Hood

#3. 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.

Athol Fugard

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

Athol Fugard

#5. 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

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

Athol Fugard

#7. Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.

Athol Fugard

#8. 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.

Athol Fugard

#9. 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

#10. We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

Athol Fugard

#11. With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.

Athol Fugard

#12. There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

Athol Fugard

#13. From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.

Athol Fugard

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

Athol Fugard

#15. 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.

Athol Fugard

#16. 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

#17. 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.

Athol Fugard

#18. The toughest challenge I faced came right at the beginning of my career with 'Blood Knot,' which was trying to convince South African audiences that South African stories also had a place on the stage.

Athol Fugard

#19. The act of witnessing is important to me; somebody's got to tell the truth, you know what I mean?

Athol Fugard

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

Athol Fugard

#21. 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.

Athol Fugard

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Athol Fugard

#25. 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

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

Athol Fugard

#27. You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.

Athol Fugard

#28. The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.

Athol Fugard

#29. Aman cant spend his life with only one thought

Athol Fugard

#30. 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

#31. 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.

Athol Fugard

#32. 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.

Athol Fugard

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

Athol Fugard

#34. People come to the Fountain Theatre because they've got hearts that are working and they've got heads that are working. They use the Fountain Theatre because it puts them in touch with the world that they're living in.

Athol Fugard

#35. 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 really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore.

Athol Fugard

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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.

Athol Fugard

#39. 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

#40. 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.

Athol Fugard

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

Athol Fugard

#42. My essential identity is that of a writer.

Athol Fugard

#43. For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

Athol Fugard