Top 40 Quotes by 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.

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.

Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.