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" 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. "

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" '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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What I feel is that true creation happens when you're making something out of nothing - like it's divine, you know. Creation is a completely divine concept. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

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