South African - Playwright | June 11, 1932 -
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
LifeGoodFatherMusicMeMy Life
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.
BeautifulThinkPowerfulAfricaWild
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.
LoveAngerLove IsMeEnergyNobody
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.
WritingAttentionYoungLivingTrue
'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.
FatherDaughterChildMeDownSober
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.
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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.
LifeSuccessNew YorkProblemsYou
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.
FriendAgeMeSayingYouBeen
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.
PeopleTheatreWorldLivingFountain
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.
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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.
LifeDemocracyMy LifeArtistNow
The act of witnessing is important to me; somebody's got to tell the truth, you know what I mean?
TruthMeYouKnowImportantMean
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