Damon Galgut

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I am happy to see you, Maso”

“Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]”

“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.”

“That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.”

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

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

“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 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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”