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" I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting. "

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" Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time. "

Eleanor Catton

Narrative

Too Much

Time

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" As an artist, you need to be not at all entitled in your relation with the work. So money is kind of worrying. You can start to expect things if you're used to a certain level of comfort. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.' "

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

" The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach. "

" I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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 have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries. "

" 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. "

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