Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
Nice
People
World
" 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
" 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
" Jim Crace's novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. "
Justin Cartwright
Time
Connection
Own
" '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
More
" 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
" '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
Story
You
Book
" It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree. "
Justin Cartwright
True
Degree
Myself
" 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
Up
" Coffee must be treated gently and smoothed out. I hadn't realised it was so temperamental. "
Justin Cartwright
Out
Must
Gently
" 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
" Not many people like Johannesburg, but I love the place. "
Justin Cartwright
Like
I Love
Love
" Transport is not a ministry the ambitious should accept: no transport minister has gone on to be prime minister. "
Justin Cartwright
Ministry
Gone
Accept
" 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
Want
Writing
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
" 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
Three
Early
Memory
" 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 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
People
Sea
Mountain
" 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
" 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. "
Justin Cartwright
Lucky
I Am
Nice
" If I was at home, I'd find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with. "
Justin Cartwright
Looking
Home
People
" 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
" Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read. "
Justin Cartwright
Me
Well
Been
" 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
" 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
" 'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword. "
Justin Cartwright
Indispensable
Says
Novel
" '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 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
Universe
Live
Moving
" 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
Seen
Years
Which
" 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
World
Theatre
Great