Damon Galgut
Damon Galgut
Damon Galgutis an award-winning South African playwright and novelist...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 November 1963
form truth unsettling
It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
measurement language moments
Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
memories return happens
Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.
morning blue sky
There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.
thinking people matter
In his clearest moments he thinks he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.
way universal locals
The only way you can be universal is to be sure you are very specifically local.
journey somewhere-else space
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.
done world deeds
If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.
associate books early hospitals ill impulse learned love number shape spent time took various
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.
almost fix good household incredibly obsession order paint point rather reach sit starting tap wall
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.
individual particular pull stunts
Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.
almost future gone involves people south white
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.
might unfinished
'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
change radical stories subject trauma
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.