Damon Galgut

Playwright

1963-11-12

Quotes by Damon Galgut

• Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. "Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room." The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

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• 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.

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• All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms.

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• He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.

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• 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.

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• All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms.

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• Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. "Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room." The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

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• He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.

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

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• Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

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• 'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.

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• Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

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• 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.

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

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