Damon Galgut Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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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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South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
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I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
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I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
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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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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 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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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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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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Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
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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 work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.
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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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There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
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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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For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.
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Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing.
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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 wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.
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Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
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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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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 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.