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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.