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" I was once asked by Jeremy Paxman what is it about celebrity and said that people these days seem to think a celebrity is someone who has escaped the constraints of ordinary people: that they don't have the same kind of problems, almost as if they're classical gods. "

Justin Cartwright

Think

Kind

People

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" Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the 'Catholic Herald.' "

" A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope. "

" '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. "

" I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same is true for women. Reading Saul Bellow is a revelation, but he can't write women. There are exceptions, like Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead,' but generally, I think it's true. "

" Jim Crace's novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. "

" Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000. "

Justin Cartwright

Coffee

Than

" 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. "

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

" My own interest in Kafka's letter came about when I was writing an article on Peter Ginz, the boy novelist held in Terezin, not far from Prague, and exterminated in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The Ginz family were from more or less the same milieu as the Kafkas. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read. "

Justin Cartwright

Well

Been

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Thoughts

Life

" 'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword. "

" 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

Man

" 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. "

" Franschhoek Valley was, in recent memory, a simple place with some notable vineyards and two or three streets of Victorian cottages and a few older, thatched houses. The valley was settled early in the 1680s by Huguenots fleeing repression. "

" 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. "

" Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time, I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact, he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term 'masterclass' was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader. "

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

" Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War. "

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

Justin Cartwright

I Love

Love

" 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

America

" 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. "

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