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

Justin Cartwright

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" This Oscar Pistorius business is interesting. There is this cult of carrying lots of guns and being ready to shoot somebody. There were people I knew had guns and carried them openly around Johannesburg. It is frowned on now to carry a gun, but Pistorius and co. got away with it. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" 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

" The great thing about the public is that they're quite capable of believing two absolutely contrary views at the same time. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" 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

" 'The Cauliflower' is full of these bizarre anecdotes, some of them petty, others moving or whimsical, as its many characters try to make sense of the universe in which they live - a universe strange, febrile, and utterly unique. "

Justin Cartwright

" James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" Helen Zille, formidable leader of the Democratic Alliance, routinely vilified as representing white interests only, is trying to make sure everyone knows that the case against Zuma is strong and is trying to have it investigated in a judicial review. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" Coffee must be treated gently and smoothed out. I hadn't realised it was so temperamental. "

Justin Cartwright

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

Justin Cartwright

" '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

" 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

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

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

Justin Cartwright

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

Justin Cartwright