Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" I love Franschhoek, and straight off the plane, I went to the incomparable Quartier Francais, on the main street, for breakfast. This small hotel and restaurant is regularly near the top of every poll for best hotel and restaurant in Africa. "
Justin Cartwright
Restaurant
Best
Breakfast
" 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
Hood
First
Write
" When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm. "
Justin Cartwright
Journey
End
History
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Three
Early
Memory
" Transport is not a ministry the ambitious should accept: no transport minister has gone on to be prime minister. "
Justin Cartwright
Ministry
Gone
Accept
" 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
" America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town - from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford - America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif. "
Justin Cartwright
American
Game
America
" 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
" 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
" 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
Years
Past
Story
" I thought that, post-apartheid, there would be absolutely no interest in South Africa. That has been both true and untrue. The major writers like Gordimer and Coetzee have produced major books. But some of the more minor writers have drifted away. "
Justin Cartwright
Thought
Africa
Books
" Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000. "
Justin Cartwright
Coffee
Than
More
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Crazy
American
Thought
" 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
" 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
" Coffee must be treated gently and smoothed out. I hadn't realised it was so temperamental. "
Justin Cartwright
Out
Must
Gently
" '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
" As Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers' rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women. "
Justin Cartwright
Government
Ahead
Republic
" 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
" This is the strange thing about South Africa - for all its corruption and crime, it seems to offer a stimulating sense that anything is possible. "
Justin Cartwright
Corruption
Africa
Crime
" The great thing about the public is that they're quite capable of believing two absolutely contrary views at the same time. "
Justin Cartwright
Great
Believing
Two
" 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
World
Theatre
Great
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Want
Writing
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 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
Never
Right
Try
" The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it. "
Justin Cartwright
Strange
Explain
You
" The plane approaches Cape Town and, as always, I am astonished by the view of Table Mountain and the surrounding sea. It is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I feel the urge to belong - not necessarily to the people, but to the landscape. "
Justin Cartwright
People
Sea
Mountain
" 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
" Advertising, the product of capitalism, can only justify itself on the premise that the market is a force for good. "
Justin Cartwright
Good
Product
Capitalism
" The fascination with Judas has persisted despite the fact that there is no evidence of the hard facts of his life. Even the 'Iscariot' attached to him may be nothing more significant than a corruption of the name of the town from which he came. "
Justin Cartwright
Corruption
Life
Name