There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.
India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.
I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.
I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.
Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present.
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.
I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.
For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.
I'm not designed to interact with society.
I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.
Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing.
Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.
Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.
Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.
Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.
Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
