Eleanor Catton Quotes

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Eleanor Catton

Profession : Author

Birth : September 24, 1985

Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.

Eleanor Catton

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

It seems pretentious to assume that we are not creatures of action. I think often it takes a situation of extreme absurdity, extreme action, to push us to the limits of what our character is, and to change us as people.

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

I've had countless reviews sort that have made me cry. It's funny, it doesn't ever get better either; you can't turn your ears off.

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

I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.

Eleanor Catton

Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

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.'

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tantrum.

Eleanor Catton

We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.

Eleanor Catton

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.

Eleanor Catton

I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.

Eleanor Catton

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

Eleanor Catton