Damon Galgut Quotes
-
I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
-
Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.
-
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
-
I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.
-
It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.
-
There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
-
I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
-
I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.
-
For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.
-
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
-
India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.
-
One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.
-
Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
-
Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
-
Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.
-
Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present.
-
I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.
-
Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.
-
I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.
-
It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
-
Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.
-
I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.
-
I first went to India because of my interest in yoga, hoping to go to the Iyengar Centre in Pune for a while. That didn't work out, but I ended up on a beach in Goa, writing.
-
I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.