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Eleanor Catton


New Zealander
September 24, 1985
Author
dolomites mountains italy
I have written ever since I knew mechanically how to do it.


Eleanor Catton
Tags: How Ever Since
beach wave sunset summer sea
I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.


Eleanor Catton
bridge wooden river romantic
From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.


Eleanor Catton
Tags: Very Had Real
My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Home Love Never
Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Women Get Very
I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.
Eleanor Catton
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Me Would Man
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.
Eleanor Catton
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: You Like Out
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: About Really Than
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!'
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Me Because Out
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: You About Had
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Think Who I Think
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Time Work Because
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: People Me Like
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: You Think Really
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
Tags: Money People Very
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.
Eleanor Catton
'The Luminaries' is such a different book to 'The Rehearsal.' There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there's a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there's patterning.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Out Things Being
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Time Poetry More
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Up His New
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Time You People
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.
Eleanor Catton
Tags: Amazing You Like