Damon Galgut Quotes
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I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
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South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
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I try to get going early, on the assumption that the way you begin your day is the way you continue. But certain books only want to be written at night, so there's no hard rule where work is concerned.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.
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Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
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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.
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There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
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Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
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For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.
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India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.
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It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
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Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
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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.
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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.
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I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.
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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.
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Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.
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I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.
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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.
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I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.