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