Quotes About Galgut

#1. 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.]

Damon Galgut

#2. 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.

Damon Galgut

#3. The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#5. South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.

Damon Galgut

#6. 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

Damon Galgut

#7. It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

Damon Galgut

#8. 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

#9. 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.

Damon Galgut

#10. 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.

Damon Galgut

#11. 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.

Damon Galgut

#12. I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.

Damon Galgut

#13. 'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.

Damon Galgut

#14. The only way you can be universal is to be sure you are very specifically local.

Damon Galgut

#15. A mixture of rapture and cowardice. No action, but all that quivering!

Damon Galgut

#16. 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

#17. Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

Damon Galgut

#18. All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms.

Damon Galgut

#19. 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.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#21. A silence followed, while the two men contemplated dying for love.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#23. I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.

Damon Galgut

#24. There are many monsters, oh, many!

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#26. 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.

Damon Galgut

#27. 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.

Damon Galgut

#28. He had it now, he thought. What he had been searching for till now: the heart of it, the central, engendering event.

Damon Galgut

#29. 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.

Damon Galgut

#30. Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.

Damon Galgut

#31. The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit.

Damon Galgut

#32. 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.

Damon Galgut

#33. He didn't depend so much on the good opinion of others to feel complete. Nor did he expect happiness as his right any longer; he knew it was only for the strong.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#35. 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

#36. To be honest and to be fair were not always the same thing.

Damon Galgut

#37. 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.

Damon Galgut

#38. There were only certain intimacies one could hope to survive.

Damon Galgut

#39. 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

#40. Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

Damon Galgut

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. All have their foolishness, and this is mine.

Damon Galgut

#44. 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.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#48. 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

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#53. 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.

Damon Galgut

#54. 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.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#57. Past a certain point, maybe, a person's character defines itself and stays fixed in your mind.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#59. It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold.

Damon Galgut

#60. 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.

Damon Galgut

#61. 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.

Damon Galgut

#62. 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.

Damon Galgut

#63. 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'.

Damon Galgut

#64. Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.

Damon Galgut

#65. 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

#66. 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

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

Damon Galgut

#68. 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.

Damon Galgut

#69. There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#71. 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.

Damon Galgut

#72. 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

#73. India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.

Damon Galgut

#74. There was something humiliating, too, in a display of grief when the relationship had been unwitnessed. No, this was to be a private suffering, like lust or literature, lived out mostly in his dreams.

Damon Galgut

#75. 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

#76. I'm not designed to interact with society.

Damon Galgut

#77. Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.

Damon Galgut

#78. 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.

Damon Galgut

#79. No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight.

Damon Galgut

#80. 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.

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

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

Damon Galgut

#83. He is incapable of examining his own pain like a spore on a slide and finding it interesting, interesting. If your own pain is interesting to yo, how much more detached will you be from somebody else's pain ...

Damon Galgut