66 Quotes by Damon Galgut

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.