Justin Cartwright Quotes

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

I was born in South Africa and lived there until I was 19.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

I just came from South Africa, a place that had been in a perpetual uprising since 1653, so the uprising had become a way of life in our culture and we grew up with rallies and strikes and marches and boycotts.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.

Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit.

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore.

The biggest problem in South Africa is that we have a disrupted timeline. Historically, politically, spiritually, economically, in people's minds, in people's heads.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.

It was a day of liberation-not only for black South Africans but also for us white South Africans. Suddenly, the burden of three hundred and fifty years had been lifted from our shoulders. For the first time we could greet all our countrymen without guilt or fear as equals and as fellow South Africans. When I awoke that morning I was still the president of South Africa. When I went to bed the mantle had passed from me to Nelson Mandela. Few heads of government could ever have laid aside their high office with a greater sense of accomplishment, regardless of the uncertainties of the future.

The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

Africanity is foisted upon the migrants the moment they arrive in the West. On the continent, most people in the rural areas live under ethnic categories like Kikuyu, Ibo, Hausa and Acholi. Some educated, middle-class and/or urban dwellers may see themselves as members of a nation like South Africa, Kenya or Tanzania. In some countries like South Africa, which has recently emerged from the crucible of apartheid, national consciousness is still strong. For most, however, "national" consciousness emerges only occasionally during Independence Day celebrations, international soccer matches or at election time. "African" consciousness, however, is a rarity

Under colonialism and apartheid, the ruling white minority stole vast amounts of land from black Africans in Zimbabwe [Rhodesia] and South Africa. Reclaiming this land became an important rallying cry for liberation movements in both countries; but in the years after white minority rule ended, it was extremely difficult for the new regimes to redistribute the land fairly and efficiently.

The free world wants to feed South Africa to the Red Crocodile, to appease its hunger.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

I hate Yeats! A lot of his poems are not very good, but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini. He was really into fascism. He believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs.

The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.

What I supported when I was a young man, was that the solution to bring justice to all in South Africa, was to build a little Europe there. Was to create so many nation states as there are actual nations, each with their own cultures, each with their own languages, that is what separate development tried and wanted to achieve.

The decay of the late, great country of South Africa is beginning to become apparent. The name of the Transvaal has been officially changed to 'Gauteng.' (One of our friends has suggested that in view of this its inhabitants in the future should be referred to as Oranggautengs.) ... And now there is a move afoot to wreck the Kruger National Park, one of the wonders of the world, on the notion that a good bit of its land was 'taken from the blacks.' This idea is somewhat akin to giving Yellowstone Park back to the Blackfeet.