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" The successful advertising agent is the one who can convince the clients that he knows something they don't. "
Justin Cartwright
Clients
Who
Successful
Related Quotes:
" 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
Rather
Work
Views
" '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 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
About
People
Point
" It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree. "
Justin Cartwright
True
Degree
Myself
" 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
" 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
" 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
Seem
Belong
Chosen
" 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
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Will
Africa
Serious
" 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
" 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
Up
Nobody
Believe
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Make
Africa
Day
" If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer. "
Justin Cartwright
Think
Up
America
" 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
Building
Clouds
Theatre
" 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
Years
Past
Story
" 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
Crazy
American
Thought
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Road
Past
Book
" 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
World
Book
Failure
" So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human. "
Justin Cartwright
English
Fiction
Human
" 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
" 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
Never
Right
Try
" 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
Cheap
Up
Moment
" 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
Gun
Business
Interesting
" 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
Small
Mind
You
" 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
" 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
Think
Kind
People