Quotes from Emma Donoghue

Keep your heart infinitesimally small, and sorrow will never spy it...

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

This is where every nation draws its first breath. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.

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.

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.

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

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Everybody's damaged by something.

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

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

Stories are a different kind of true.

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