Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.
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.
'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.
Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.
I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
I try to get going early, on the assumption that the way you begin your day is the way you continue. But certain books only want to be written at night, so there's no hard rule where work is concerned.
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.
Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
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.
I first went to India because of my interest in yoga, hoping to go to the Iyengar Centre in Pune for a while. That didn't work out, but I ended up on a beach in Goa, writing.
While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through.
I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.
I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.
Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.
