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" I have worshipped Berlin from the day I read 'Two Concepts of Liberty' in South Africa. It seemed to make it respectable to be a liberal. "
Justin Cartwright
Make
Africa
Day
Related Quotes:
" You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction. "
Justin Cartwright
Believe
Create
Job
" In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd. "
Justin Cartwright
Love
Innocent
Advertising
" I suppose on the filmmaking side, you can learn how to cram a lot into a small space. But I think that advertising, even on what is called the creative side, is incredibly easy if you have that kind of mind. A lot of people regard it as Machiavellian and dangerous, but, in fact, it is morally neutral. "
Justin Cartwright
Small
Mind
You
" 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
Lucky
I Am
Nice
" For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material. "
Justin Cartwright
Moral
Useful
Seen
" The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people. "
Justin Cartwright
About
People
Point
" If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer. "
Justin Cartwright
Think
Up
America
" Franschhoek - French Corner - is a place which serves South Africans as a kind of sophisticated fantasy, an alternative version of what life could be. The small town is enclosed by wild mountains, at this time of year blue and dusty green. "
Justin Cartwright
Life
Green
Wild
" It is surprising how many people who don't read believe they have a book in them. Why? Nobody would imagine that Alfred Brendel took up the piano on a whim at 25 when he found accountancy unpleasant. "
Justin Cartwright
Up
Nobody
Believe
" 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
Up
Thoughts
Life
" Just before the opening of the 20th century, the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are born into great privilege on the Upper East Side of New York, in a mansion overlooking Central Park. "
Justin Cartwright
Privilege
New
Born
" It is uncomfortable to be reminded that the Catholic church only removed the reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy in 1960. "
Justin Cartwright
Good
Uncomfortable
Church
" Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that 'many of us have a road that reaches back into our past'. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 - as he subtitles his book, the 'Highway to the Sun'. "
Justin Cartwright
Road
Past
Book
" 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
Time
Art
Find
" 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
Coffee
Everything
Movement
" '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
Events
Artist
Man
" 'Homer and Langley' is the work of E. L. Doctorow's old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind. "
Justin Cartwright
Old Age
Work
You
" 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
American
Me
Man
" 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
Looking
Point Of View
Life
" 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
Piano
Writing
Chosen
" Nadine Gordimer came over just before she died. She didn't want to talk about books or the arts, but about the abuse of the constitution by the government. "
Justin Cartwright
Constitution
Talk
She
" Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000. "
Justin Cartwright
Coffee
Than
More
" There was loose talk of Enron management practices and reminders of a scandal at the University of Toronto, when a big donor corporation, Eli Lilly, was said to have vetoed the appointment of an academic who doubted the effectiveness of Prozac. "
Justin Cartwright
Management
Big
Toronto
" Writing 'Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle' must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened. "
Justin Cartwright
Facts
Writing
Difficult
" '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
Disturbing
Imagery
Book
" '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
Story
You
Book
" It was my idea to do a two-hour course of barista training. I was keen to learn how to finish off my coffee with a picture of a heart or a palm tree or, perhaps, a swan. "
Justin Cartwright
Heart
Training
Tree
" If I was at home, I'd find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with. "
Justin Cartwright
Looking
Home
People
" 'A Just Defiance' has been a huge success in South Africa. While reading at times like a well-written thriller, its significance is to reveal apartheid to have been far more brutal, ruthless, and self-serving even than we had suspected. "
Justin Cartwright
Reading
Success
More
" The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter's original allegory of truth and light striking the university is now bright with playful cherubs and lustrous clouds. "
Justin Cartwright
Building
Clouds
Theatre