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" 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. "

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" The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated. "

Eleanor Catton

Left

White

People

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Eleanor Catton

Winter

Growing Up

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

Eleanor Catton

Zealand

New

" 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. "

" 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. "

Eleanor Catton

Book

Fact

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "