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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" '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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "