Athol Fugard Quotes

I don't remember much about what he said because my head was trying to deal with that one word" the future! He kept using it ... " our future" "the country's future", "a wonderful future of peace and prosperity." What does he really mean, I keep asking myself. Why does my heart go hard and tight as a stone when he says it? I look around me in the location at the men and women who went out into that wonderful future before me. What do I see? Happy and contented shareholders in this in this exciting enterprise called the Republic of South Africa? No. I see a generation of tired, defeated men and women crawling back to their miserable little pondoks at the end of a day's work for the white baas or madam. And those are the lucky ones. They've at least got work. Most of them are just sitting around wasting away their lives while they wait helplessly for a miracle to feed their families, a miracle that never comes.

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.

The clocks are ticking my friends. History has got a strict timetable. If we're not careful we might be remembered as the country who arrived to late.

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

Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.

The only person there was little Sipho Fondini from Standard Six, writing on the wall: "Liberation first, then education." He saw me and called out: "Is the spelling right, Mr M?" And he meant it! The young eyes in that smoke-stained little face were terribly serious. Somewhere else a police van raced past me crowded with children who should have also been at their desks in school. Their hands waving desperately through the bars, their voices called out: "Teacher! Teacher! Help us! Tell our mothers! Tell or fathers!

'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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Come to school! Come to school. Before they kill you all, come to school!
[Silence]
[MR M looks around the empty classroom. He goes to his table, and after composing himself, opens the class register and reads out the names as he did every morning as he did at the start of a new day.]
Johnny Awu, living or dead? Christopher Bandla, living or dead? Zandile Cwati, living or dead? Semphiwe Dambuza ... Ronald Gxasheka ... Noloyiso Mfundweni ... Stephen Gaika ... Zachzriah Javabu ... Thami ... Thami Mbikwana ... [Pause] Living or dead?
How many young souls do I have to present this morning? There are a lot of well-aimed stray bullets flying around on the streets out there. Is that why this silence is so ... heavy?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

My essential identity is that of a writer.

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.

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.