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" 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. "

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" 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

Write

Darkness

First

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Damon Galgut

Lying

Work

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

Damon Galgut

Writing

Kind

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "