Damon Galgut Quotes

He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.

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.

Even in one's most physical moments, the real craving was for love.

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.

I am happy to see you, Masood."
"Happy? Happy? What a pale, pathetic English word. You must not be 'happy' to see me. No, you must be enraptured, transported! You must be overjoyed. I have no use for 'happy'.

I'm not designed to interact with society.

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

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.

There are many monsters, oh, many!

In his clearest moments he thinks he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.

He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.

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 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.

What did love mean if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence?

Other people might have to confess their sins, but he, Morgan, could only confess their absence.

All have their foolishness, and this is mine.

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.

He is wearing he same black pants from yesterday, but no shirt, his body is brown and hard, perfectly proportioned. He knows that he is beautiful and somehow his makes him ugly.

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.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

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.

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.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold.

Fire and water and smoke and incense and chanting and bells and butter and blood: this was a language whose syllables were translated into physical terms; a language of the elements. It was a language that he hoped might speak to him one day.

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.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

As a result, he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away

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.

I blame it on the heat. And Morgan had gone to India, and the heat had not undone him. He had remained respectable.

The funny thing is, I don't care too much. You think you love something so badly, but when it's gone you find out you don't care so much.

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

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

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

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.

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.

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.

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

They are being driven by a psychopathic Indian apparently bent on killing them all, overtaking on blind rises, racing some other bus to settle an old score, hurtling into corners without slowing down.

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.

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.

There was no reason why he should not lift the veil aside.
Well, there was Lily. He could imagine his mother's face if he told her he was giving up meat and alcohol and going to live off the land and make sandals. Not to mention homogenic love. The veil might be thin, but in some cases it was insurmountable.

On that lonely road they looked like mirror images of each other. Perhaps each of them thought of real communication as unnecessary, words divide by multiplying, what was certain was the oneness underneath the words. But now they refrain from talking because it might reveal to them how dangerously unlike one another they are. An image in a mirror is a reversal, the reflection and the original are joined but might cancel each other out.

Why did people believe it was only the flesh that binds?

My dear, he talked of peering into catamites' anuses, if you can conceive of anything more wonderful.

There were some, naturally, who would understand, and he wrote for them, or for himself. Anyhow, some idealised reader who would accept everything, and forgive.

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.

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.

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

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

Race and class were a kind of destiny; very little could dent them. Morgan himself had been decanted back into the vessel that had made him.

What I don't understand about your type is that you want to emulate the other side. You kick up such a commotion about being different, and all you want is to be the same.

Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?

There were only certain intimacies one could hope to survive.

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

Forgive me my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell

Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.