Eleanor Catton Quotes

Author Image

Eleanor Catton

Profession : Author

Birth : September 24, 1985

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.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

I'm a Libra. I'm happy to be an air sign, but I do think I have a little too much air in my chart as a whole - some more water would be useful, especially in my personal life, as an emotional counterweight to all that abstraction.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

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.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

Eleanor Catton

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

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

Eleanor Catton

I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.

Eleanor Catton

From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.

Eleanor Catton