I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.
I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.
It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice.
You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.
Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.
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.
I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes I'll read something on Twitter, and I'll just be in the darkest of moods for the rest of the day or the rest of the week sometimes.
I've had countless reviews sort that have made me cry. It's funny, it doesn't ever get better either; you can't turn your ears off.
I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.
Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.
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.
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.'
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.
I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.
