Quotes from Damon Galgut

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

I'm not designed to interact with society.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.