ELEANOR CATTON

In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.

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.

Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.

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.

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

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.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.

Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.

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.

I believe really strongly in imitation, actually: I think it's the first place you need to go to if you're going to be able to understand how something works. True mimicry is actually quite difficult.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

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.

Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.

My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tantrum.

Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.

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.

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 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.

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.

I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.