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" 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
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" 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
" 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
Government
Violence
Revolution
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Time
Connection
Own
" 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
" 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
" '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
" 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
Black
Problems
People
" 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
" '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
" 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
" Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth. "
Justin Cartwright
Africa
Want
Truth
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Coffee must be treated gently and smoothed out. I hadn't realised it was so temperamental. "
Justin Cartwright
Out
Must
Gently
" In his later years, Ramakrishna took up residence at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, from where his radiance extended far, even beyond his death in 1886. "
Justin Cartwright
Beyond
Death
Far
" 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
You
Writer
Art
" Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel. "
Justin Cartwright
Theme
Consciousness
Modern
" It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree. "
Justin Cartwright
True
Degree
Myself
" 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
" 'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword. "
Justin Cartwright
Indispensable
Says
Novel
" Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the 'Catholic Herald.' "
Justin Cartwright
Writer
Four
Years
" 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
" 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
" 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
" If Franschhoek has a fault, it is in the lavish refurbishment of wine farms and estates which has reached absurd proportions. Some, like Graf Delaire Estate, are brand new, with jewellery shops, indoor streams, and very high-end lodges for rent at prices not many South Africans can afford. "
Justin Cartwright
New
Brand
Fault
" 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
" 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
Photography
World
Day
" 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
New
Music
Know
" 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