178 quotes found
"We hear a great deal about sex nowadays; it is possible to overestimate its importance, because there are always people who pay it little attention or who apparently manage, like Sir Isaac Newton, to get along, without giving it a thought."
"Who strolls so late, for mugs a bait, In the mists of Maida Vale, Sauntering past a stucco gate Fallen, but hardly frail?"
"The commonplace needs no defence, Dullness is in the critic’s eyes, Without a licence life evolves From some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms, Behind these hedges trimly shorn, As in a stable once, so here It may be born, it may be born."
"It's so utterly out of the world! So fearfully wide of the mark! A Robinson Crusoe existence will pall On that unexplored side of the Park — Not a soul will be likely to call!"
"Out of that bungled, unwise war An alp of unforgiveness grew."
"On a sofa upholstered in panther skin Mona did researches in ."
"A family portrait not too stale to record Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."
"Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind, When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind, And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind."
"With first-rate sherry flowing into second-rate whores, And third-rate conversation without one single pause: Just like a young couple Between the wars."
"A pleasant old duffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."
"When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin: An abstemious man would reel at her look As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book."
"A rose-red sissy half as old as time."
"'Look who's here! Do come and help us fiddle while Rome burns!'"
"So never say to D'Arcy, 'Be your age!' — He'd shrivel up at once or turn to stone."
"Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too, D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S., Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!"
"His most celebrated poems are, of course, the historical-satirical ballads (A or even X certificate) in which a person or period is "hit off", in the sense both of being preserved and hit for six."
"His poetry may be divided into comic extravaganza on the one hand, and more personal work on the other. There is no one like him in the world in the former genre; as a "light poet" he is preferable to John Betjeman – as fluent in traditional forms, his work is never vitiated by refuge in the poetical or high sentimental, and his choice of words is subtler, funnier and altogether sharper. In his other vein Plomer is fastidious, reticent, elegant and the author of some memorable and moving lines."
"To write was a need; I had to write down messages, to tell apartheid's horrors."
"I always imagined poetry is supposed to be beauty, about beauty and pleasant things. Well I sat in a train one day and saw this lorry full of furniture going, coming here... and I wrote a poem about Group Areas ‘Fall tomorrow.’ In the last stanza I wrote, that the government of that time is going to fall [ ]. This was about the anger. Bringing out all the anger of moving and seeing this people moving and seeing people breaking up their wardrobes and their cupboards because it can’tfit through the doors here."
"Rooted in Salt River, Simon’s Town and Ocean View, Gladys Thomas’s narration of the struggle of a nation for freedom challenged the construct of ‘forgotten communities’. She championed the tribulations and triumphs of people who did not have the means to tell their stories in the distinctive and memorable way in which she took up their plight."
"Being a storyteller is my passion, and I am so happy to have unlocked a first for myself. This role was both adventurous and fun."
"I hope this is the same emotion the audience gets when watching the series."
"I am a huge fan of the International Emmy Awards and the work that they do, so being a juror is sooo [sic] awesome. This one is definitely for the books and a privilege I will never take for granted."
"For all agonies of the joints: Lum¬ bago, rheumatism, tennis elbows, housemaid’s knees;also ideal for bunions, corns, callouses"
"Too many cooks spoil the broth"
"No smell doth stink as sweet as labour, Tis joyous times when man and man Do work and sweat in common toil.When all the world’s my neighbor."
"Ethel Lange, 10 de Villiers Street, Oudtshoom. I am eighteen years old and well-developed and would like to correspond with a gent of sober habits and a good outlook on life. My interests are nature, rock-and-roll, swimming and a happy future. My motto is, ‘rolling stones gather no moss.’ Please note: I promise to reply faithfully"
"Twenty-two and no strings attached. Would like letters from men of the same age or older. My \interests are beauty contests and going out. A snap with the first letter, please."
"Betty Jones. Roodepoort. Young and pleasing personality. I’d like to correspond with gentlemen friends of maturity. No teenagers need reply. My hobby at the moment is histori¬ cal films, but I’m prepared to go back to last year’s, which was autograph hunting. I would appreciate a photo¬ graph"
"I’m sure you’d like to know I got your letter, and the picture. I’d say Oudtshoom seems okay. You were quite okay too. I would like to send you a picture of me, but it’s this way. It’s winter down here. The light is bad, the lake is black, the birds have gone. Wait for spring, when things improve. Okay? Good. I heard you ask about my car. Yes. I have it. We pumped the tires today. Tomorrow I think I’ll put in some gas. I’d like to take you for a drive, Ethel, and Lucy too. In fact. I’d like to drive both of you. They say over here. I’m fast. Ethel I’ll tell you this. If I could drive you, Ethel, I would do it so fast, Ethel, and Lucy too, both of you, so fast I would, do it so fast, fast, fast it would hurt—"
"I notice your brother got boots. All policemen got boots. Good luck to him, any¬ way, and Lucy too. Write soon. Zachariah Pietersen"
"I like the thought of this little white girl"
"I took a good look at my life. What did I see? A bloody circus monkey! Selling most of his time on earth to another man. Out of every twenty-four hours I could only properly call mine the six when I was sleeping. What the hell is the use of that?"
"This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statutes erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn’t for Styles. That’s what I do, friends. Put down, in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children’s children will remember a man."
"Burn that book? Stop kidding yourself, Sizwe! Anyway, suppose you do. You must immediately go apply for a new one. Right? And until that new one comes, be careful the police don’t stop you and ask for your book. Into the Courtroom, brother. Charge: Failing to produce Reference Book on demand. Five rand or five days."
"You must understand this. We own nothing except ourselves. This world and its laws, allows us nothing except ourselves."
"Sizwe Bansi, in a manner of speaking, is dead!"
"I don't want to die."
"What's wrong with me? I'm a man. I've got eyes to see. I've got ears to listen when people talk. I've got a good head to think things. What's wrong with me?"
"I don't want to lose my name, Buntu."
"Are you really worried about your children, friend, or are you just worried about yourself and your bloody name? Wake up, man! Use that bloody book and with your pay on Friday you'll have a real chance to do something for them."
"Hold it, Robert. Hold it just like that. Just one more. Now smile Robert... Smile... Smile..."
"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."
"Yes! That's what all our talk about a decent world has been... just so much bullshit.""We did say it was still only a dream.""And a bloody useless one at that. Life's a fuck-up and it's never going to change."
"It's just that life felt the right size in there... not too big and not too small. Wasn't so hard to work up a bit of courage. It's got so bloody complicated since then."
"Sam: There's no collisions out there, Hally. Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else. That's what that moment is all about. To be one of those finalists on that dance floor is like... like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don't happen. Hally: Jesus, Sam! That's beautiful! Willie: [Can endure waiting no longer.] I'm starting! [Willie dances while Sam talks.] Sam: Of course it is. That's what I've been trying to say to you all afternoon. And it's beautiful because that is what we want life to be like. But instead, like you said, Hally, we're bumping into each other all the time. Look at the three of us this afternoon. I've bumped into Willie, the two of us have bumped into you, you've bumped into your mother, she bumping into your Dad... None of us knows the steps and there's no music playing. And it doesn't stop with us. The whole world is doing it all the time. Open a newspaper and what do you read? America has bumped into Russia, England is bumping into India, rich man bumps into poor man. Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right? ... Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it? Hally: You've got a vision, Sam! Sam: Not just me. What I'm saying to you is that everybody's got it. That's why there's only standing room left for the Centenery Hall in two weeks' time. For as long as the music lasts, we are going to see six couples get it right, the way we want life to be. Hally: But is that the best we can do, Sam watch six finalists dreaming about the way it should be? Sam: I don't know. But it starts with that. Without the dream we won't know what we're going for. And anyway I reckon there are a few people who have got past just dreaming about it and are trying for something real."
"Be careful, Hally." "Of what? The truth? I seem to be the only one around here who is prepared to face it."
"Life is just a plain bloody mess, that's all. And people are fools."
"Sam: So then what is art? Hally: You want a definition? Sam: Ja. Hally: [He realizes he has got to be careful. He gives the matter a lot of thought before answering.] Philosophers have been trying to do that for centuries. What is Art? What is Life? But basically I suppose it's... the giving of meaning to matter. Sam: Nothing to do with beautiful? Hally: It goes beyond that. It's the giving of form to the formless."
"Bullshit, as usual."
"Flicker of morbid interest."
"But things will change, you wait and see."
"I'm all right on oppression."
"Tolstoy may have educated his peasants, but I've educated you."
"Sam, Willie ... is he in there with you boys?"
"In fact, I was shit-scared that we were going to make fools of ourselves."
"Little white boy ... and a black man old enough to be his father flying a kite."
"You want to get into the story as well, do you?"
"It was you who start me ballroom dancing."
"Not just me. What I'm saying to you is that everybody's got it."
"He certainly was trying to teach people to get the steps right."
"All you've got to do is stand up and walk away from it."
""It doesn't have to be that way. There something called progress, you know. We don't exactly burn people at the stake anymore."
"We need a definition of greatness, and I suppose that would be somebody who... somebody who benefited all mankind.""
"It's the likes of you that kept the Inquisition in business. It's called bigotry.""
"I think I spent more time in there with you chaps than anywhere else in that dump. And do you blame me? Nothing but bloody misery wherever you went.""
"To be one of those finalists on that floor is like... like being in a dream world in which accidents don't happen.""
"He's a white man and that's good enough for you."
"I mean, how do I wash off yours and your father's filth?...I've also failed. A long time ago I promised myself I would do something, but you've just shown me...Master Harold...that I've failed."
"Fly another kite, I suppose. It worked once, and this time I need it as much as you do.""
"Tonight I find Hilda and say sorry. And make promise I won't beat her no more. You hear me, Boet Sam?"
"Sam: But don’t let me see it. The secret is to make it look easy. Ballroom must look happy, Willie, not like hard work. It must Ja!It must look like romance."
"Hally: I oscillate between hope and despair for this world as well, Sam."
"Anybody who lets facts interfere with his imagination is a person who will never enjoy anything else again."
"There's nothing wrong with the world. It just goes around and around, and you gotta get on with your life."
"Mr. Sam was our father. He knew about our dreams and ambitions."
"I’m in the business of making people realize that their opinions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on."
"Aah, violence is the only way I can make people pay attention to me."
"There’s no question he’s smarter than I am, but does that give him the right to call me a name like that?"
"A hint of water, a whisper of foam. Long, white tails streaming behind them as they twist and turn in the bay."
"Without me breathing down your neck all the time, you’d lean even more to the right than you do now."
"You were scared of the ball because it was big and hard and could hurt you, just like life can hurt you."
"Somebody once said that there are only two places you can be alone—inside your mother’s womb and inside your coffin."
"I thought I was keeping it straight and I’ve suddenly wondered whether it is straight, and whether it matters whether it is or not."
"Doesn’t it sort of bug you that people like your dad can’t take care of the world?"
"Do you think Fathers do any more for their sons, except in terms of money, that Mothers do for their daughters."
"Don’t talk crap, Hally! You don’t even know what the word ‘sympathy’ means."
"She’s no match for him when it comes to a battle of words."
"Hally: It’s a bloody awful world when you come to think of it. People can be real bastards. Sam: That’s the way it is, Hally. Hally: It doesn’t have to be that way. There is something called progress you know. We don’t exactly burn people at the stake anymore."
"Hally: Anyway, that’s my man of magnitude. Charles Darwin! Who’s yours? Sam: [without hesitation] Abraham Lincoln. Hally: I might have guessed as much. Don’t get sentimental, Sam. You’ve never been a slave, you know. And anyway, we freed your ancestors here in South Africa long before the Americans."
"Hally: Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants then go home and write a ‘little book’ called War and Peace. Incidentally, Sam, he was somebody else who, to quote, ‘…did not distinguish himself scholastically."
"It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened…’ we are the ‘they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit."
"We go for what we call a joll. All it means is that we engage in an orgy of drinking, raping, and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns."
"You have always been good at creating beautiful things with your hands."
"We are like two hands that wash each other."
"By the time he has finished, every inch of the walls is covered with bright pictures – a wallpaper of sheer luxury."
"In those days, they did not allow people of his colour onto any of the beaches of the city, so he could not carry out his ablutions there, as he does today."
"Funerals were held only on Saturday and Sunday mornings those days, because death was not as prevalent then as it is at present."
"Hymns flow into one another in unplanned but pleasant segues."
"It is strange how things don’t change in these shanty towns or squatter camps or informal settlements or whatever you choose to call them."
"You see, they say they are fighting for freedom, yet they are no different from the tribal chief and his followers. They commit atrocities as well."
"Men, on the other hand, tend to cloud their heads with pettiness and vain pride. They sit all day and dispense wide-ranging philosophies on how things should be. With great authority in their voices, they come up with wise theories on how to put the world right. Then at night they demand to be given food, as if the food just walked into the house on its own. *When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories."
"When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories."
"Bhonco is different from the other Unbelievers in his family, for Unbelievers are reputed to be such somber people that they do not believe even in those things that can bring happiness to their lives. They spend most of their time moaning about past injustices and bleeding for the world that would have been had the folly of belief not seized the nation a century and a half ago and spun it around until it was in a woozy stupor that is felt to this day.”"
"The Cult of the Unbelievers began with Twin-Twin. Bhonco Ximiya’s ancestor, in the days of the Prophetess Nongqawuse almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The revered Twin-Twin had elevated unbelieving to the heights of religion.”"
"Yes, Bhonco carries the scars that were inflicted on his great-grandfather, Twin-Twin, by men who flogged him after he had been identified as a wizard by Prophet Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. Every first boy-child in subsequent generations of Twin-Twin’s tree is born with the scars.”"
"Camagu has no heart to tell her that Athens is a college town that is even smaller than the nearby town of Butterworth*."
"The villagers will actually lose more than they will gain from the few jobs that will be created. Very little of the money that is made here will circulate in the village."
"The boats are now restored to their former glory as a reminder of a bygone era and bygone manual practices so that present and future generations can see how fishermen of the old endured the stormy seas in small open boats powered by their own muscles."
"Conversely, Noria’s memory of the village is the pale herd boys, with mucus hang- ing from the nostrils, looking after cattle whose ribs you could count, on barren hills with sparse grass and shrups. The lean cattle and barren hills are partly result of overgrazing, which is in turn due to shortage of land for black people."
"They do not like to be called squatters. How can we be squatters on our land, in our own country? Squatters are those who came from across the sea to steal our land"
"For instance, when the Whale Caller wants to consummate relationship with his wife, images of whale interfere at the moment of ex- citement and he goes limp"
"He has neither touched a whale nor even Sharisha, except with his spirit - with his horn. He knows absolutely that this boat-based whale watching will be abused"
"They rig Sharisha with dynamite. [...] the emergency workers place more than five hundred kilograms of dynamite in all the strategie places, especially close to Sharisha's head. Like a high priest in a ritual sacrifice a man stands over a contraption that is connected to the whale with a long red cable. With all due solemnity he triggers the explosives. Sharisha goes up in a gigantic baU of smoke and flame. [...] [The Whale Caller] is looking intently at the red, yellow and white flames as Sharisha rises in the sky. It is like Guy Fawkes fireworks"
"Yet there is nothing that rises, phoenix-like, out of the ashes. All the Whale Caller can do at the scene of the explosion is sit "silent and still as blubber rains on him. Until he is completely larded with it""
"Lunga Tubu's voice coming from the waves, singing a Pavarotti song," he muses wistfully that "maybe one day Pavarotti will adopt him""
"I’m busy documenting a thousand stories about Johannesburg. Oral histories? No, stories. People don’t always speak the truth."
"This is Africa, my friends … These folks do things differently. Sven Taxel, who regards himself as an expert on South Africa because he has read Wilbur Smith, Rian Malan and André Brink, tries to calm his fellow congregation members."
"What happened wasn’t a revolution. It was a deal. The creation of a new bunch of entrepreneurs who could be more easily manipulated by international capital."
"But Sara has spent enough time in the darkness to know that you often have to remain there for a long time before you’re ready for the light again."
"So I am not exactly sure what I imagine and what I remember. Is there a difference? Not much, if you ask me."
"Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!"
"My chubby little brother! Perhaps he’s having a little ‘crisis of conscience’!’ perhaps, because of their culture."
"For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write."
"In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me…"
"We were lovers in everything but in name."
"Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways."
"...as I was to later find out, the skin was neither soft nor the hair so smooth as I had first imagined."
"Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?"
"Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?"
"No, I'll die of a vaster, deeper, more cruel conspiracy by the ruler of my country who have made a certain knowledge between persons of different races not only impossible to achieve but positively dangerous even to attempt to acquire. They have made contact between the races a cause for profoundest alarm among white citizens."
"The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!"
"Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer."
"Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!"
"The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last."
"So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with the other."
"Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on?""
"He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly."
"All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened."
"And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight."
"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were."
"The moment the metal box speaks her name, she knows it’s happened. She’s been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can’t remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground."
"They park in the driveway under the awning, with its beautiful green and purple and orange stripes. Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre."
"[Ockie] imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain. A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky."
"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."
"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."
"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."
""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."
"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."
"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."
"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."
"I’m not in a position where I can sit back and go on with life as normal without working ... I take on any and all of the jobs offered to me."
"They still pay me the same as, let’s say, 10 years ago,” she said. “I’m worth much more than that and so are my peers... I will take hands with anyone supporting my stance, something needs to be done."
"Although my role in Legacy was not big, I still enjoyed working with them."
"In my head Charmaine does no longer exist and I made peace with that ... A lot of people still call me Charmaine, especially in the shops"
"Even though I had friends as a child, I often chose to be on my own because my games were not conventional children’s games."
"I was the one who initiated school plays and drama projects."
"At primary school I re-wrote the Nativity, inventing a story about a blind girl who dreamt about witnessing the birth of Jesus and when she woke up, on Christmas morning – she could see! My teachers were so impressed, they allowed me to direct it as well."
"In high school, drama was not part of the syllabus, so I organised drama classes after school and did a play with a few other students which was recommended to be performed for the South African Black Students Association’s first national congress."
"If I am to be known by a colour, then I want to be known as a brown South African. I tried for so long to be black, politically, but that proved to be a misnomer."
"I think university catches you at a very specific time in your life where you, yourself, are trying to figure out yourself."
"There will be points where the work will not be magnificent and there will be moments when it comes back to itself again."
"You don’t have to create something new. Just be in a conversation and then something new will arise."
"I won't lie, when you are into theatre ... first, people like to assume that a professional actor is only the one that's on TV, but that's a lie, because there are professional actors making a living in theatre. For me, personally, when I graduated with my diploma, I didn't want to do TV (jobs)."
"When people like or love you for your work, they can even see you behind a mask!"
"In terms of his life as a character, it's been hard. In terms of me as an actor, it's been a great journey to have to play such a complex character and to have to challenge myself to gelling to the emotion, to the life and to the imaginary lifestyle that he has. It's been a learning curve for me and I am still trying to understand where I can go further in terms of my career."
"When you're into theatre and you are lucky enough to gigs in theatre, we tend to think that TV actors are coconuts. So I didn't want to do TV because I thought I was gonna be one of those 'cheesy' actors ... However, as time went by, I grew and became a man with responsibilities and the luxury to choose? Well, that was demolished and I had to audition for TV,"
"I think there's no difference in acting for TV and for theatre, that was just me ... As long as you are telling the truth and you are true to the script and to the character. You can get away with anything as long as you tell the truth."
"We met her and she allowed us to speak to women about their lives and challenges. I decided to create a drama because I don’t think that there is a human being who wakes up and decide to be a prostitute"
"What I like about the story is that this is the honest portrayal of sex workers and their lives"
"But I am happy that black people are telling black stories though they are controlled in how they should tell them."
"“I have a lot of friends who are writers and they want to tell amazing black stories, but they can’t because they are not allowed to. There is a variety of stories to tell but there is no platform and that’s frustrating"
"Without any conscious intent, I have found that sometimes, when trying to bring a character to life, an instinct in me would force me to withdraw from the world of the set"
"Generally speaking, a movie set is a wonderful place for an actor to be"
"I’m often described as “the crazy actor who camps in the bush”, but becoming an outsider has been a deliberate decision on my part"
"I’ve always wanted to remain something of a stranger on set and to the other actors, since this has enabled me to choose how to interact and joust with the movie set – actors and crew – as an entity that I am part of, but, at the same time, apart from."
"I’ve always known that I am an outsider, and I believe every actor has to arrive at that magical island where it’s okay to be different and set up shop on the beach"
"Google can teach you many different things, but certain acting tricks can only be learnt through experience."