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

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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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it. "

" 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. "

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