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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes I'll read something on Twitter, and I'll just be in the darkest of moods for the rest of the day or the rest of the week sometimes. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways. "

" An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt. "

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

" '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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "