Eleanor Catton Quotes

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Eleanor Catton

Profession : Author

Birth : September 24, 1985

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

Eleanor Catton

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.

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

I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.

Eleanor Catton

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

Eleanor Catton

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

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

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

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.

Eleanor Catton

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

I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.

Eleanor Catton