I often feel intellectually frustrated when I’m in a position where I’m not moving forward; when I’m not enquiring about something.

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.

Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.

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.

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.

'The Luminaries' is such a different book to 'The Rehearsal.' There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there's a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there's patterning.

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.

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 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.

I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp.