Damon Galgut Quotes

I think once you've finished a movie you really have to detach from it so that you can come back and watch it as an audience member.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.

In a crazy way, writing is a lot like any kind of very complex game - like chess, where you have the knowledge as you're composing all of the ramifications of each move, of each choice you make.

At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out.

I get emotionally attached with every film I do, and that stops me from being critical. I can't fight my emotions.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

I didn't want to lose my subjectivity and my objectivity about my work.

Once I finish a film, I don't ever see it again. Never ever. I have never seen any of my films since I finished them.

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

I try not to identify too strongly with any of my characters. I like to stand back and see them objectively. I think this is why I often use boys instead of girls, just in case I get too close and lose the overall picture.

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.

I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me.

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I study myself. I study film, and I make sure that everything's on point.

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

A lot of us saw Blackadder in terms of problem-solving - 'Did that work in that episode?' and so on. We were very picky.

Whatever affect any of my films have on audiences, I just kind of stop at the door. I make them and I just don't go outside after they're over.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

Balzac, you know, our great Balzac, he wrote interesting things about how in literature you keep distance in order to express great feelings. You have to keep a distance - and it's exactly the same with acting.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.