Top 25 Damon Galgut Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Damon Galgut Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I try to get going early, on the assumption that the wa

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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
‘Arctic Summer,’ as you might know, is the title of Forster’s one unfinished novel.
Damon Galgut
I’m not designed to interact with society.
Damon Galgut
Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.
Damon Galgut
I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.
Damon Galgut
I wrote large chunks of ‘The Impostor’ and ‘The Good Doctor’ on a beach in Goa.
Damon Galgut
Being gay myself, I’m naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
Damon Galgut
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.
Damon Galgut
There aren’t a lot of ‘Aha!’ moments in writing.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
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.
Damon Galgut
Something in a writer’s brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
Damon Galgut
Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing.
Damon Galgut
Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.
Damon Galgut
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
Damon Galgut