Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton MNZMis a Canadian-born New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In January 2015, she created a short-lived media storm in New Zealand when she made comments in an interview in India in which she was critical of "neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture."...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth24 September 1985
direction
From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.
air chart emotional life personal
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.
amazing emotional excited follow found influenced interior novel recently shows strongly tv
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.
actively art connect literature looking people power reading reject work
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.
built cared patterns structural
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.
novels
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!'
love money
Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.
self perspective exclusion
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.
girl heart race
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?
views underestimate point-of-view
Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
mean astrology psychology
The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.
views way social
The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.
desire kind reason
Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.
men unhappy want
All men want their whores to be unhappy.