Top 50 Justin Cartwright Quotes

It’s true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree.

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

The great thing about the public is that they’re quite capable of believing two absolutely contrary views at the same time.

It was my idea to do a two-hour course of barista training. I was keen to learn how to finish off my coffee with a picture of a heart or a palm tree or, perhaps, a swan.

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.

Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time, I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact, he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India.

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

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.

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.

If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In his later years, Ramakrishna took up residence at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, from where his radiance extended far, even beyond his death in 1886.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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

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.

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Homer Collyer’s chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing.

I love Franschhoek, and straight off the plane, I went to the incomparable Quartier Francais, on the main street, for breakfast. This small hotel and restaurant is regularly near the top of every poll for best hotel and restaurant in Africa.

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

‘The Infinities’ is a shortish book but densely loaded with Nabokovian slyness, gorgeous imagery, and disturbing insights into what it means to be mortal.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘The Cauliflower’ is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.