My essential identity is that of a writer.

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

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

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.

If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along.

Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground.

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.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

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.

The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.

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 have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

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

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

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.

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 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.