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

My essential identity is that of a writer.

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

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

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.

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.

Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.