Eleanor Catton
My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Beauty
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.
Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
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.
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.
I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.
I have written ever since I knew mechanically how to do it.
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.
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!'
My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.
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.
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.
I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.
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.
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.
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.
It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice.
In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are - about luck and identity and how the idea struck them.
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.
The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
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.
I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
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 really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.
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.
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.
Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.
I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.
From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.
I highlight everything I find interesting, and then type out everything I've highlighted, and then print out everything I've typed, and reread these printed notes as often as possible.
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 zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in.
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.
I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.
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 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.
Any description of a person that comes from the outside is very hard to deal with. People don't like being summarised. It's nice to receive a compliment, but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
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 think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
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.
I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
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.
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.
I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.
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.
I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.
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.
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.