Quotes from 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.

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.

You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.

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.

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.

A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.

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.

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!'

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.

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.

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.

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.

The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.

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.

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

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.

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.

One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People's gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed.

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.

I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

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