Damon Galgut Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 89 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Damon Galgut.
Famous Quotes By Damon Galgut
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
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
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
My dear, he talked of peering into catamites' anuses, if you can conceive of anything more wonderful. — Damon Galgut
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
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
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
I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings. — Damon Galgut
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
Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences. — Damon Galgut
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
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
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
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
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
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
Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women. — Damon Galgut
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. — Damon Galgut
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
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
Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory. — Damon Galgut
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
Even in one's most physical moments, the real craving was for love. — Damon Galgut
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter. — Damon Galgut
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. — Damon Galgut
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
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it. — Damon Galgut
I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction. — Damon Galgut
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. — Damon Galgut
I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out. — Damon Galgut
If you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there's only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of life. — Damon Galgut
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me. — Damon Galgut
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
A silence followed, while the two men contemplated dying for love. — Damon Galgut
Past a certain point, maybe, a person's character defines itself and stays fixed in your mind. — Damon Galgut
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
The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear. — Damon Galgut
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
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
All have their foolishness, and this is mine. — Damon Galgut
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
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
Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye. — Damon Galgut
India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand. — Damon Galgut
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
The only way you can be universal is to be sure you are very specifically local. — Damon Galgut
'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel. — Damon Galgut
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
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
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
Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody? — Damon Galgut
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
For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise. — Damon Galgut
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
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
What did love mean if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence? — Damon Galgut
There are many monsters, oh, many! — Damon Galgut
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
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
I'm not designed to interact with society. — Damon Galgut
Other people might have to confess their sins, but he, Morgan, could only confess their absence. — Damon Galgut
He had it now, he thought. What he had been searching for till now: the heart of it, the central, engendering event. — Damon Galgut
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
The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit. — Damon Galgut
Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland. — Damon Galgut
While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme. — Damon Galgut
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. — Damon Galgut
Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing. — Damon Galgut
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
It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold. — Damon Galgut
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
Under the elaborate filigree of language, hadn't it always been about this deferment, this selfishness, this veil drawn over the obvious truth, which was that Masood simply did not care enough? Morgan could not look at the possibility for long, but at least he could look at it, and over the coming days he took it out and hurt himself with it at particular moments when he was alone. He had always been slow to comprehend his own feelings, and it came only gradually to him how disappointed he was. — Damon Galgut
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
Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress. — Damon Galgut