Damon Galgut Quotes
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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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Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.
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I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.
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I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.
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Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
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Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
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I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.
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I'm not designed to interact with society.
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Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through.
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Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.
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'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
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While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.
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Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.
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Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.
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I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.
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Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.