There was a computer in our garage when I was growing up, and I'd go out there in winter and wrap myself in a blanket and write a story.
I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.
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.
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.
Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.
From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.
It is less fun to talk about what I am feeling rather than what I am thinking. Saying 'I feel awesome' isn't really interesting or enquiring.
The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.
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.
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.
I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
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.
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.
