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.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

My essential identity is that of a writer.

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

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.

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