Justin Cartwright Quotes

If Franschhoek has a fault, it is in the lavish refurbishment of wine farms and estates which has reached absurd proportions. Some, like Graf Delaire Estate, are brand new, with jewellery shops, indoor streams, and very high-end lodges for rent at prices not many South Africans can afford.

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

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.

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 book that meant most to me was ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England.

We authors certainly don’t know what is going to happen to our books. Are they going to disappear into the ether, following music downloads, or are ebooks going to open up a whole new world of readers? And how much are we being paid per copy? We haven‘t a clue.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of the books printed in England since the first quarter of the 17th century, it houses priceless printed texts, manuscripts, and collections.

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

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

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.

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

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.

‘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.

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

‘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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers‘ rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women.

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.

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.

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.

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.