Eleanor Catton

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. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

The nice thing about the zodiac as a system is it is quite comprehensive as a range of impulses and psychological states it can speak about. ”

The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in. ”

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. ”