Eleanor Catton Quotes
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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.
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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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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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I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
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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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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 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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Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
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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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I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.
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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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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.
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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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Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.
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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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My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
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The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
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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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It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice.
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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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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.
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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.