Quotes from Damon Galgut

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

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.

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

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

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

Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

As she starts to read, the book travels into her from a long distance, from his mind to mine, across a gap in time, and now she's not in the room any more, she's inside the sentences, one joined to the next like a series of tunnels, connected to each other at angles.

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.

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

What happens in a room lingers there invisibly, all deeds, all words, always. Not seen, not heard, except by some, and even then imperfectly. In this very room both birth and death have taken place. Long ago, maybe, but the blood is still visible on certain days, when time wears thin.

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.

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.]

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

then he's gone. She can hear him walking away up the passage. His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn't turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally.

Foolish old earth, returning and repeating itself, over and over. Never misses a show. How can you bear it, you ancient tart, giving the identical performance again and again, evenings and matinées, while the theatre crumbles around you, the lines in the script unchanging, to say nothing of the make-up, the costumes, the extravagant gestures … Tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that …

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

A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing, till she's looking at a black boy, also thirteen years old, wearing ragged shorts and T-shirt, broken takkies on his feet.

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.