Quotes by Eleanor Catton

About Eleanor Catton:

Eleanor Catton is a Canadian-born New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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 ...

Eleanor Catton

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

I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other peo...

Eleanor Catton

The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.

Eleanor Catton

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

Eleanor Catton

A man should not be made to answer for his family.

Eleanor Catton

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.

Eleanor Catton

We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.

Eleanor Catton

Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way. The appearance of cooperation was worth...

Eleanor Catton

you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.

Eleanor Catton

He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.

Eleanor Catton

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

Eleanor Catton

I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.

Eleanor Catton

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

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

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

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

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

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 Bio

  • NameEleanor Catton
  • DescriptionNew Zealand writer
  • BornSeptember 24, 1985
  • CountryNew Zealand
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Novelist
  • WorksThe Luminaries
  • AwardsMan Booker Prize