Quotes by Eleanor Catton - Page 2

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.
Eleanor Catton / Author
New Zealand
Carried
Zealand
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What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers?
Eleanor Catton / Author
Girl
Heart
Race
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Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Complement
Great Your Own
Renewable
Resource
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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 / Author
Beauty
Experience
Felt
Inadequacy
Language
Natural
Stunning
Sublime
Views
Words
Scale
Cannot
Confront
Convey
Describe
Total
Natural Beauty
See
View
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I highlight everything I find interesting, and then type out everything I've highlighted, and then print out everything I've typed, and reread these printed notes as often as possible.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Notes
Print
Type
Highlight
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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 / Author
Optimistic
Acknowledge
Dignity
Grace
Human Nature
Products
Nature Time People
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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 / Author
Patterns
Cared
Structural
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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 / Author
Biography
Covers
Right-Handed
Uninteresting
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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 / Author
Comfort
Entitled
Relation
Work Money Your
Work Money Start
Certain Level
Worrying
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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 / Author
Compliment
Description
Uncomfortable
Me People Feel
Receive
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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 / Author
Australian
Mum
Life Time Work
Authors
Life Work Time
Split
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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 / Author
Imitation
First Place
Strongly
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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 / Author
Crime
Graham
James
Quite A Lot
Raymond
Researching
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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.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Gestures
Mannerisms
Victorian
Closely
Identified
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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 / Author
Devastated
Exhilarating
Bad One
Misunderstand
Strangely
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I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Collectively
Craft
Principle
Workshop
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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 / Author
Hypnotic
Mirrors
Phrases
Together
Again
Am
Back
Same
Days
Time I Am Way
Listen
Often
Over
Putting
Repeat
Sentence
Something
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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 / Author
Absurdity
Creatures
Limits
Pretentious
Extreme
Assume
Push
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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 / Author
Conventional
Describing
Gold
New Zealand
Zealand
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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 / Author
Identity
Luck
Struck
Women Writers
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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 / Author
Block
Female Artists
Stumbling
Throwing
Expectation
Letting
Stumbling Block
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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 / Author
Abstraction
Personal Life
Useful
Chart
Libra
Sign
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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 / Author
Actively
Alienate
Connect
Work Art Power
Reject
Something People
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Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Essence
Perfect
Real
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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.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Diverse
Had Enough
Italian
Phrases
Readership
Victorian
Money Enough People
German
French
Enough Money
Money People Enough
Literate
Published
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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 / Author
Canterbury
Hardware
New Zealand
Paper
Part Time
Video
Round
Hardware Store
Outlet
Store
Zealand
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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 / Author
Buried
Concrete
Entertaining
Narrative
Out Of Time
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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 / Author
Mum
Ran
Tears
Temper
Authentic
Burst
Tantrum
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'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 / Author
Intimacy
Preoccupation
Rehearsal
Link
Shut
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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 / Author
Improvising
Intervals
Notes
Unexpected
Scale
Possibilities
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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 / Author
Injustice
Weirdness
Amplified
Cheerfully
Owning
Thank
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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 / Author
My Generation
New Zealand
Young Writers
Gap
Radically
Zealand
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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 / Author
Arthur
Beloved
Chapel
Chosen
Grew
Hours
Mountain
New Zealand
Proximity
Spiritual
Village
Worn
Wild
Cathedral
City
Distant
Island
Parents
Pass
Saddle
Touchstone
Zealand
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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 / Author
Drinking
Lied
Red Wine
Wine
Time Yourself Long
Associate
Time Long Yourself
Teased
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For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Imagination
Men
Self Esteem
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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 / Author
Equivalent
Influenced
Interior
On-Screen
Strongly
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It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Dawn
Perspective
Self
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I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "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 interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.
Eleanor Catton / Author
Ideas
Luck
Thinking
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