Emma Donoghue Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

I'm named after Jane Austen's Emma, and I've always been able to relate to her. She's strong, confident but quite tactless.

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.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

Feminism is still one of those taboo words, so hardly anybody talks about it. People usually go gender-neutral and say the book and film [Room] are about "the triumph of the human spirit.

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

The idea was to focus on the primal drama of parenthood: the way from moment to moment you swing from comforter to tormentor, just as kids simultaneously light up our lives and drive us nuts. I was trying to capture that strange, bipolar quality of parenthood. 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.

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.

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

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...

Everyone's got a different story.

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.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

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

I'm finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.

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

There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.

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

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 very interested in how idealistic young people can get caught up in all sorts of systems of extreme belief, you know, whether it's cults or whether it's suicide bombers.

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.

I must say, in the case of "Room," both the book and the film, I don't think being a lesbian author held me back at all.