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" A trip to the picture framer's, with a selection of prints, is the most joyous outing I can imagine. I've spent more money on framing than on anything else I own. "

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" Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily. "

Eleanor Catton

Man

Would

Book

" I've had countless reviews sort that have made me cry. It's funny, it doesn't ever get better either; you can't turn your ears off. "

Eleanor Catton

Better

Funny

" I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild. "

" Any description of a person that comes from the outside is very hard to deal with. People don't like being summarised. It's nice to receive a compliment, but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. "

Eleanor Catton

People

Compliment

" I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another. "

" I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good. "

" The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things. "

" In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are - about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. "

" Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource. "

" Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again. "

" I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual. "

" I have written ever since I knew mechanically how to do it. "

" I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so many amazing shows recently have done as much as film can do to show the interior world. "

" Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one. "

" I highlight everything I find interesting, and then type out everything I've highlighted, and then print out everything I've typed, and reread these printed notes as often as possible. "

" Astrology's a moving system that depends on where you're looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand. "

" I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something. "

" My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tantrum. "

" I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century. "

" I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand. "

" I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children. "

" It is less fun to talk about what I am feeling rather than what I am thinking. Saying 'I feel awesome' isn't really interesting or enquiring. "

" I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve. "

" In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected. "

" Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature. "

" Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field. "

" In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith. "

" It seems pretentious to assume that we are not creatures of action. I think often it takes a situation of extreme absurdity, extreme action, to push us to the limits of what our character is, and to change us as people. "

" Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love. "

" The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me. "

Eleanor Catton

Zealand

New