People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.
Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.
There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—...
Even the best writer has to erase.
I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.
Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.
...science fiction is something that happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that happen - though often you only wish that it could.
Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
He was the least spiritual of all the monks here, accepting nothing without proof. This skepticism was simultaneously his greatest asset and his greatest impediment.
I imagined a time when being gay is as unquestioned and un-judged as is having blue eyes. Some might call it fantasy or science fiction. I’d like to think it’s the future.
Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.
I was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be more, because they see it in me.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
The folktale world is oriented positively toward its protagonist; a folktale is defined by the hero's triumph: magic weapons and helpers are, with the necessary narrative retardation, at his beck and call.
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.
Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.
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...
