Eleanor Catton Quotes

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

In comics, there are depths that don't reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about 'Watching the Watchmen' - like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air - might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

I do tend to be an analyzer. I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables.

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

And it's interesting, but I'm always interested in the story behind the story.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

It's amazing what some people read into songs.

When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

Everything's connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it.

When you make illustrations, you're supposed to have a subtext; you're not just communicating words - you're actually adding another story altogether.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.