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" Homer Collyer's chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing. "

Justin Cartwright

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" It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea. "

Justin Cartwright

" We authors certainly don't know what is going to happen to our books. Are they going to disappear into the ether, following music downloads, or are ebooks going to open up a whole new world of readers? And how much are we being paid per copy? We haven't a clue. "

Justin Cartwright

" In the new artisan coffee movement, Jeremy Challender, a 32-year-old Australian who is one of the founders of Prufrock Coffee, explains precision is everything for the barista. Jeremy is able to analyse his coffee with the benefit of an app on his phone. "

Justin Cartwright

" Advertising, the product of capitalism, can only justify itself on the premise that the market is a force for good. "

Justin Cartwright

" The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England. "

Justin Cartwright

" I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me. "

Justin Cartwright

" I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man. "

Justin Cartwright

" It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree. "

Justin Cartwright

" I thought I'd write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn't have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died. "

Justin Cartwright

" I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think 'Pigeon Feathers' was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism. "

Justin Cartwright

" 'Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising' by Winston Fletcher - the impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant but ultimately shallow business. "

Justin Cartwright

" I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published. "

Justin Cartwright

" The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that's about it. "

Justin Cartwright

" 'Point Omega' starts in an art gallery, where an unnamed man is watching, day after day, a 24-hour version of 'Psycho,' an installation that was created by the Scottish artist, Douglas Gordon. In it, the events and the minutiae of Hitchcock's film are painfully slowly reproduced; the watcher is obsessed with the detail revealed. "

Justin Cartwright

" I write from what I take to be the realist's point of view, looking at life as it really is - or the way I see it to be. "

Justin Cartwright

" The ANC was the product of a much earlier South Africa, a gradualist and non-tribal multi-racial organisation, driven to violence by the intransigence of the Afrikaner Nationalist Government, obsessed with improbable ideas of revolution. "

Justin Cartwright

" There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life. "

Justin Cartwright

" As I read 'The Infinities', with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J. M. Coetzee, with his bleak, pared-down, elemental view of the world, had ever read a Banville and, if he had, whether he had envied him his astonishing powers. "

Justin Cartwright

" Helen Zille, formidable leader of the Democratic Alliance, routinely vilified as representing white interests only, is trying to make sure everyone knows that the case against Zuma is strong and is trying to have it investigated in a judicial review. "

Justin Cartwright

" Not many people like Johannesburg, but I love the place. "

Justin Cartwright

" 'The Infinities' is a shortish book but densely loaded with Nabokovian slyness, gorgeous imagery, and disturbing insights into what it means to be mortal. "

Justin Cartwright

" Someone once pointed out that there are quite a lot of animals in my books, and I'm sure that is something to do with 'The Wind in the Willows.' I must have picked up a rather anthropomorphic view of them. "

Justin Cartwright

" The druidical claims for Stonehenge seem to belong to that bonkers-but-persistent strand of Englishness that believes there is something particularly mystical about the English themselves, who were clearly a chosen people. "

Justin Cartwright

" DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years, Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America. "

Justin Cartwright

" My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets. "

Justin Cartwright

" Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art. "

Justin Cartwright

" Germany led the world in photography and film: 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and 'Metropolis' are works that, to this day, film buffs revere. "

Justin Cartwright

" It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life. "

Justin Cartwright

" The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it. "

Justin Cartwright

" The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of the books printed in England since the first quarter of the 17th century, it houses priceless printed texts, manuscripts, and collections. "

Justin Cartwright