Quotes

I am very simple and minimalistic when it comes to dressing up in my personal life.

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.

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.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My parents keep me grounded. I've spent a lot of time on my own in my life, and I've learnt the hard way.

I have seen really happy people in my life sing really well. Yes, when people get fame, then there's depression.

Fatherhood has changed me and my perspective towards life.

I really miss my youth. I'm not being ungrateful, but there was an Atif who used to roam the streets, who didn't care whether his photograph was taken or not, who used to hang out without people staring at him. I miss that carefree life and would give anything for it, even if it only lasts a few moments.

Democracy is a revelation, but it's complicated. There are elections to hold, politics to create, rights to assert, grievances to settle and institutions to build. To many, it's exhilarating. For others, it can be disappointing when it turns out that democracy doesn't immediately make life better.

If the student sitting in a class is unable to understand anything day in and day out, then that has a serious and long-term psychological impact on his/her life.

Politics is far more complex and difficult than other professions, as it involves takeover of your own personal life.

Peterson was the most coachable athlete I have had in my life, and I coach many athletes.

It's not selling out, necessarily, to do something to gain some kind of notoriety that gives you the cache to do be able to go and do something else that you want. There's some dues that you just have to pay in life.

There's some dues that you just have to pay in life.

These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of actions.

All I know, is that I feel extremely blessed to be on TV. It's a hard job, but real life is harder. Truth be told, playgrounds can be war zones.

I believe that one version of the good in life can be defined by the moments I sometimes had playing tennis as a sixteen-year-old. You'd be out on the court and for an hour, two hours, sometimes an entire roasting hot day, and every single thing you hit would go in. Hit that ball as hard as you wanted, wherever you wanted, and it went in.

I have always believed that there is nothing greater than a life in rock n' roll - it has to be good rock n' roll - and I still think it is true.

I won't be surprised if I stopped acting after some years because there are other things in life that interest me.