Eleanor Catton Quotes

I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

'Bleak House' remains a great novel for me, and I love 'David Copperfield.'

Dickens belongs to the English people.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

Generally, I'm not anti the novel.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

I grew up loving books and stories. Reading became my favourite pastime, and you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

I read prodigiously as a child, and I still do.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.

I am a social realist writer.

I'm the weird person who completely loved and devoured 'Middlemarch' but who has not finished far shorter and more readable books due to distraction or the fact that by some miracle I am sleeping through the night.

'Macbeth' is one of those books that demand all of your attention.

'The Good Earth' is a great book.

My love was always in books. I was just one of those avid readers. Films came later, but the stories were always present.

The Thorn Birds' by Colleen McCullough. I took it on a holiday to Greece and just fell in love with it.

I grew up on Jane Austen novels and was a massive literature fanatic when I was a kid - I read everything I could get my hands on.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.