Damon Galgut

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

Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through. ”

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives. ”

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise. ”

Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it. ”

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 obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult. ”

I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention. ”

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. ”

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me. ”

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. ”