Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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!' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "