Athol Fugard Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.”

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

“My essential identity is that of a writer.”