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" 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. "

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" 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

Man

" 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. "

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

Justin Cartwright

Coffee

Than

" A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example. "

" 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

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

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

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

" I have worshipped Berlin from the day I read 'Two Concepts of Liberty' in South Africa. It seemed to make it respectable to be a liberal. "

" 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. "

" As I read 'The Infinities', with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J. M. Coetzee, with his bleak, pared-down, elemental view of the world, had ever read a Banville and, if he had, whether he had envied him his astonishing powers. "

" 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. "

" When I wrote my first serious novel, 'Interior', I was inspired by a 1978 book of Updike's, 'The Coup', which is set in Africa and will come as a delightful surprise to anyone who has only read his Americana. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'A Just Defiance' has been a huge success in South Africa. While reading at times like a well-written thriller, its significance is to reveal apartheid to have been far more brutal, ruthless, and self-serving even than we had suspected. "

Justin Cartwright

Reading

Success

" Germany led the world in photography and film: 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and 'Metropolis' are works that, to this day, film buffs revere. "

" The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it. "

" 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

Nobody

Believe

" 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. "

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

Justin Cartwright

Ministry

Gone

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "