Words matter. These are the best Athol Fugard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
‘Master Harold’ is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There’s a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven’t passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who’s stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’ve always sensed for myself an obligation to bear witness to my time.
I’ve had one experience of writer’s block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.
Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.
Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.
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.
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.
