Damon Galgut Quotes

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.

I wrote large chunks of ‘The Impostor’ and ‘The Good Doctor’ on a beach in Goa.

I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.

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 should confess that I’m woefully under-read in South African fiction.

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.

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.

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

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.

Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing.

Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not designed to interact with society.

Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

Something in a writer’s brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

I’m constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That’s the kind of writing that interests me.

South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.

‘Arctic Summer,’ as you might know, is the title of Forster’s one unfinished novel.

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.

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.