A biography for Damon Galguthasn’t been written yet.
“Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.”
“I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.”
“If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.”
“Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.”
“I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.”
“I'm not designed to interact with society.”
“India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.”
“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 constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.”
“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.”
“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.”
“South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.”
“It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What he sensed more than anything else was kindness – a kindness of a human and immediate sort. It was surprising how very radical this simple emotion could be.”
“'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.”