Eleanor Catton Quotes
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The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in.
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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.
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I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.
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An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.
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My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
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I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.
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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.
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My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
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I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
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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.
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The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
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It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice.
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Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.
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I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.
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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.