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" '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

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

Justin Cartwright

" Franschhoek Valley was, in recent memory, a simple place with some notable vineyards and two or three streets of Victorian cottages and a few older, thatched houses. The valley was settled early in the 1680s by Huguenots fleeing repression. "

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

" Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art. "

Justin Cartwright

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

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" '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

" 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

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

Justin Cartwright

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Justin Cartwright

" 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

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

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

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

Justin Cartwright

" 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

" '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

" 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

" Personally, I have detested Gordon Brown since the moment in 2001 when he tried to make cheap capital out of the Laura Spence affair; as his troubles have piled up, I have felt no sympathy for him at all. "

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

" So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human. "

Justin Cartwright

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

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

" 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

" 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 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. "

Justin Cartwright