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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. "

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" 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. "

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

" 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 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I went to a state school in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then straight on to the University of Canterbury. But I worked part-time all the way through high school: first with a paper round, then at a fast-food outlet, a video store and a hardware store. "

" 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. "

" My sense of injustice about our family's 'weirdness' in not owning a car was amplified by the fact that we did not own a television, either - my parents were unapologetic about this and told me very cheerfully that I would thank them for it when I was older, which was quite true. "

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

" I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things. "

" 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. "

" There was a computer in our garage when I was growing up, and I'd go out there in winter and wrap myself in a blanket and write a story. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well. "

" 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. "

" 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. "