Emma Donoghue Quotes

I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

I've been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it's never inspired me to write anything. It's too good - nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that's what makes for good stories.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

We're standing on the deck that's all wooden like the deck of a ship. There's fuzz on it, little bundles. Grandma says it's some kind of pollen from a tree. "Which one?" I'm staring up at all the differents. "Can't help you there, I'm afraid." In Room we knowed what everything was called but in the world there's so much, persons don't even know the names.

She leaped into space, high, higher than she'd ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.

Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.

It's all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw an airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can't go there because we don't know the secret code, but it's real all the same. Before I didn't know to be mad that we can't open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it.

The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.

I found motherhood a crash course in existentialism (what is my purpose in life, am I mistress or slave of my destiny, when the hell do I get some sleep?) and [the book] ROOM was the result.

Me and Ma have a deal, we're going to try everything one time so we know what we like.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

I was anticipating that some readers might misread [the book] ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

I'm a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.

I think about Old Nick carrying me into the truck, I'm dizzy like I'm going to fall down. "Scared is what you're feeling," says Ma, "but brave is what you're doing." "Huh?" "Scaredybrave." "Scave." Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn't being funny.

At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture

I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.

Once I spent a whole day there, a blade of grass in each hand to anchor me to the warm earth. I watched the sun rise, pass over my head and set. Ladybirds mated on my knuckle; a shrew nibbled a hole in my stocking while I tried not to laugh. Such a day was worth any punishment.

When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.

Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel.

For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have...

What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I'm not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.

I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.

I was highly aware, in writing [the book] ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance.

I guess the feminism in "Room" springs to mind most.

My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

You know who you belong to Jack? - Yeah. Yourself. - He's wrong, actually, I belong to Ma. p. 261 Room by E Donoghue

So much as I enjoy big novels of epic sweep, I often find, say, if they follow several generations, by the third generation, I'm not caring about the people anymore.

Any parent knows how to be the ideal parent.

Kissing a witch is a perilous business. Everybody knows it's ten times as dangerous as letting her touch your hand, or cut your hair, or steal your shoes. What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart?

The film world is far more male-dominated. I mean, the numbers are staggering at the level of how many people on set there are, and almost all the trades in film, there's a lot more men. So I can see without anyone intending to be biased [that] we have kind of a collective choosing of men's stories and a collective of taking men's stories seriously.

I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.

There are so many examples today of how the kind of wonderful zealousness and unquestioning loyalty of young people can be harnessed by all sorts of insidious powers.

Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.

When I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jumping into the other’s head, like coulouring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

Everybody's damaged by something.

In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.

And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.

Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.

I read three books a week.

I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.

I always wince a little bit when I send me to each of my new books. I wince at submitting myself to my father's judgment. But, of course, he's such a fond father that he always writes back, saying it's the greatest thing ever written.

...sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.

Nowadays, 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.