Quotes from Emma Donoghue

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga.

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.'

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.

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

This is a bad story." "Sorry. I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have told you." "No, you should," I say. "But—" "I don't want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

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

The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.

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.

In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

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