Emma Donoghue Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” When a bit of me hurts, I always mind.

Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.

If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.

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.

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

Stories are a different kind of true.

...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.

Vitamins are medicine for not getting sick and going back to Heaven yet.

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.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

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

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

Everybody's damaged by something.

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

I watch his hands, they're lumpy but clever. "Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?" Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?

He [Ma's Tooth] was part of her a minute ago but now he's not. Just a thing.

The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.

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

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

Everyone's got a different story.

People move around so much in the world, things get lost.

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 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.

Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.

Seriously, I think what all the puzzling over parenthood I had to do to write [a novel] ROOM taught me is that children can thrive in a remarkable range of situations.

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

I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.

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'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.

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.

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.

I think ultimately the film 'Room' is a kind of hymn to motherhood and to the everyday heroism of parents who find their smiles in terrible times.

I wrote the novel [Room], and then I thought, "This could work on film, and I want to be the one to do it." So I went ahead and drafted it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.

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

You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just let's you get on with it.

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