Emma Donoghue Quotes

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away - meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic but to find a cinematic equivalent.

Every parent has those moments where they look at their child and think, 'There's a demon in those eyes and no one can see it but me!

I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.

I think I know what it's like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

What's crucial about being an executive producer is that you stay in the loop, information-wise. They have to share all their major decisions with you.

Sometimes, I think there's a lack of ambition in me. But then sometimes, I think, no, you can, like William Blake said, you know, see heaven in a grain of sand. If you look really, really closely at a situation, you can find almost endless interest in it.

The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.

I needed to do a lot of saying no. I had a lot of [interest] from people who I just didn't think were quite right for it. And I didn't want a bad film to be made of the book, either a sentimental one or a creepy one, so I did a lot of, "No thank you." Then when the right filmmaker came along, yes, I suppose I presented myself very much as wanting to be the writer.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.

I think I read Susan Brownmiller's classic book called "Femininity" when I was about 16. So yeah, it's been part of my mindset since a very early age. To me, what's crucial is to tell women's stories but also to tell them in a way that is fearless.

There's not a thing wrong with you, you're right the whole way through.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

I really like to keep my palette small but to be very intense, very myopic.

I say "on principle" [regarding 'lesbian writer'] because whenever you get one of your minority labels applied, like "Irish Writer," "Canadian Writer," "Woman Writer," "Lesbian Writer" - any of those categories - you always slightly wince because you're afraid that people will think that means you're only going to write about Canada or Ireland, you know.

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.

Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.

The paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

It turns up the heat under a narrative when you limit the characters in their movements or their freedoms.

There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night.

I've always been religiously inclined, but it doesn't come up in most of my books.

Everyone's got a different story.