Emma Donoghue
There's no neutral language about travel. Either travel is described in ways that make it sound kind of shallow or just glossy or silly or a way for rich people to spend their time; or else travel is often described in quite derogatory ways, you know, like immigrants swarming across borders, for instance.Collection: Travel
I'm finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.Collection: Failure
Ah yes, 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.Collection: Chance
I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.Collection: Business
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.
One thing I like about historical fiction is that I'm not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you're obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.
Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.
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.
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.
I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.
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've always been religiously inclined, but it doesn't come up in most of my books.
Kids delight in 'magical thinking', whether in the form of the Tooth Fairy or the saints: whether you see these as comforting lies or eternal verities, they are part of how we help kids make sense of the world.
I'm a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.
I'm constantly saying, 'I read a fascinating article in 'The New Yorker'... ' I say it so often that sometimes I think I have nothing interesting to say myself, I merely regurgitate 'The New Yorker.'
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 lets you get on with it.
You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.
I've been writing full-time since I was 23.
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.
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 think the only difference between me and other people is that when I hear of an interesting historical incident, I immediately write it down and Google it.
A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
You know the way there are two kinds of actors - the De Niro kind who's always De Niro, and then somebody like Daniel Day-Lewis, who transforms himself eerily? Well, I aim to be the Daniel Day-Lewis kind of writer. I don't have a house style.
I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.
I remember a period where my publisher said to me, 'Look, your historical work is selling much better than your contemporary work, so please give us more historicals.'
I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person's point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I'm not naturally good at strong plot.
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.
It's painful to consider anything but writing.
Any parent knows how to be the ideal parent.
You know, plenty of people headed off to Canada or America on the basis of government information, propaganda campaigns. Often you'd go off with a brochure in hand and you'd turn up and it wouldn't be like that at all.
I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga.
I have never been depressed or thrown a plate, which I attribute to the cathartic effects of writing books about people whose lives are more grueling than mine.
The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.
I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.
I read three books a week.
I got in the habit of giving away a book as soon as I've finished it because I lived in a housing co-op at Cambridge and had no space to keep books.
I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.
Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.
Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.Collection: Courage
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.Collection: Jobs
Stories are a different kind of true.Collection: Truth
People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.Collection: People
I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.Collection: People
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.Collection: Nodding
It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” When a bit of me hurts, I always mind.Collection: Hurt
Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.Collection: Reading
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?Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Book
Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.Collection: Wells