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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Books

View

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar's failures. "

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

" 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. "

" It is uncomfortable to be reminded that the Catholic church only removed the reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy in 1960. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Justin Cartwright

I Love

Love

" 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. "

" Transport is not a ministry the ambitious should accept: no transport minister has gone on to be prime minister. "

Justin Cartwright

Ministry

Gone

" For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material. "

" 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. "

" 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. "