Damon Galgut Quotes

There's a very famous South African playwright named Athol Fugard, and I'd be in any play he's ever did.

I know exactly what I will do. I will go and work with the Congress of South African Students.

The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.

I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.

Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living.

When I was in South Africa, I went for dinner with some friends, and I knew more about their history than they did - it just hasn't been told.

Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.

Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.

We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.

The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.

The very first role I ever played was as a 17-year old South African girl who dreamed of being a star and left home to meet her mother in the big city so that she could pursue that dream. I left South Africa and met my mother in Vancouver and not long after that was given the opportunity to perform on the stage and have people chant my name.

My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

I definitely have to admit that I am fairly ignorant, not just to 'Tron,' but almost any pop culture thing that I should know, at my age. I grew up without a television and rarely got to see a movie, so I didn't really see any of that stuff, and I haven't been able to catch up since.

I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

South African ministers are anxious to deal out fair treatment, but are hampered by public opinion…and a degree of racial prejudice of which they themselves, as individuals, are largely free.

two centuries behind ours; their literati, half a dozen years before us.

In the name of humanity the South African Government must be stopped. That Government has criminally taken up arms against my people