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" I believe really strongly in imitation, actually: I think it's the first place you need to go to if you're going to be able to understand how something works. True mimicry is actually quite difficult. "

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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. "

Eleanor Catton

I Can

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Picture

" 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. "

" The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in. "

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

" 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. "

" The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated. "

" My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home. "

" What I wanted to create with 'The Luminaries' is a book that had structural patterns built in that didn't matter, but if you cared about them, you could look into the book and see them. "

" We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive. "

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

" I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by. "

" 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. "

" 'The Luminaries' is such a different book to 'The Rehearsal.' There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there's a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there's patterning. "

" 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. "

" When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!' "

" I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it. "

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

" I'm a Libra. I'm happy to be an air sign, but I do think I have a little too much air in my chart as a whole - some more water would be useful, especially in my personal life, as an emotional counterweight to all that abstraction. "

" You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing. "

" I think it's more optimistic about human nature to acknowledge that people are the products of their time but then to see that they have moments of grace and dignity that everybody has. "

" 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. "

" One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People's gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed. "

" 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. "

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

" The nice thing about the zodiac as a system is it is quite comprehensive as a range of impulses and psychological states it can speak about. "