Eleanor Catton

“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 much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.”

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

“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.”

“I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.”

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

“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.”

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

“Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”