Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground. Athol Fugard Read Quote
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. Athol Fugard Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Athol Fugard Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I’ve always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I’ve always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown. Athol Fugard Read Quote
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. Athol Fugard Read Quote
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 Read Quote
