Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England. "

Justin Cartwright

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

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

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Justin Cartwright

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

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

" The successful advertising agent is the one who can convince the clients that he knows something they don't. "

Justin Cartwright

" 'Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising' by Winston Fletcher - the impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant but ultimately shallow business. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

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

Justin Cartwright

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

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

Justin Cartwright

" '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

" It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" '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

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" There was loose talk of Enron management practices and reminders of a scandal at the University of Toronto, when a big donor corporation, Eli Lilly, was said to have vetoed the appointment of an academic who doubted the effectiveness of Prozac. "

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