Zitat des Tages von Damon Galgut:
Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
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.
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 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.
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.
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
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.
'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
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.
Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
I'm not designed to interact with society.
Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.
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.
While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.