Eleanor Catton Quotes

I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.

'Island of the Blue Dolphins' by Scott O'Dell had a huge impact on me.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.

'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.

I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.

When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.

I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

Authors have a nationality; books do not.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.

I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.

The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England.

The two books I've re-read more than any others are Guenter Grass's 'The Tin Drum' and Victor Hugo's 'Notre-Dame de Paris'.

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.

In France, I am just Madame Campbell. In Jamaica, nobody uses my title.

As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.