Damon Galgut

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

“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.”

“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 obsess...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.”