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
‘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
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
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
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. – Justin Cartwright
The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it. – Justin Cartwright
Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the ‘Catholic Herald.’ – 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
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
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
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
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. – Justin Cartwright
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. – Justin Cartwright
Just before the opening of the 20th century, the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are born into great privilege on the Upper East Side of New York, in a mansion overlooking Central Park. – 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
As I read ‘The Infinities’, with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J. M. Coetzee, with his bleak, pared-down, elemental view of the world, had ever read a Banville and, if he had, whether he had envied him his astonishing powers. – Justin Cartwright
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. – Justin Cartwright
For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material. – Justin Cartwright
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
‘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
Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from ô?1,600 to more than ô?20,000. – Justin Cartwright
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
‘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
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. – Justin Cartwright
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. – Justin Cartwright
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
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
‘The Cauliflower’ is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword. – Justin Cartwright
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. – Justin Cartwright
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