Top 250 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

52. “I’ve seen the world and I’m tired now.”

— Emma Donoghue

53. “May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage.”

— Emma Donoghue

54. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

55. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

56. “When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.”

— Emma Donoghue

57. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

59. “It’s all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw an airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can’t go there because we don’t know the secret code, but it’s real all the same. Before I didn’t know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it.”

— Emma Donoghue

60. “I was not exploiting any real individual’s story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality.”

— Emma Donoghue

61. “The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.”

— Emma Donoghue

62. “The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.”

— Emma Donoghue

63. “Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.”

— Emma Donoghue

64. “I’m finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

66. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

67. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

68. “Any parent knows how to be the ideal parent.”

— Emma Donoghue

69. “Once I spent a whole day there, a blade of grass in each hand to anchor me to the warm earth. I watched the sun rise, pass over my head and set. Ladybirds mated on my knuckle; a shrew nibbled a hole in my stocking while I tried not to laugh. Such a day was worth any punishment.”

— Emma Donoghue

70. “I think I know what it’s like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

72. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

73. “I’m very keen. Adaptations of other people’s work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that’d be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it’s become one of my favorite genres.”

— Emma Donoghue

74. “Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.”

— Emma Donoghue

75. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

76. “Books are the air I breathe, so I don’t notice the seasons.”

— Emma Donoghue

77. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

78. “I’m a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.”

— Emma Donoghue

79. “I read three books a week.”

— Emma Donoghue

80. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

81. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

82. “I’ve always been religiously inclined, but it doesn’t come up in most of my books.”

— Emma Donoghue

83. “It was Anubis who set your heart on the scales against the Feather of Truth, and if your crimes weighed it down at all, it was thrown to the crocodile-faced demoness Ammit like any other scrap of meat. Only the clean-hearted got to walk forever in the Field of Reeds.”

— Emma Donoghue

84. “I’ve certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.”

— Emma Donoghue

85. “With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can’t have the audience getting restless in their seats. They’re stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can’t lose your way.”

— Emma Donoghue

86. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

88. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

89. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

90. “I read a lot of social history. If I’m in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

92. “No, I mean everything feels different, but it’s because I’m different.”

— Emma Donoghue

93. “Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.”

— Emma Donoghue

94. “Nowadays, ‘invisibility’ was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

96. “Good nurses follow rules,” Lib growled, “but the best know when to break them.”

— Emma Donoghue

97. “I’ll be in Heaven getting your room ready.”

— Emma Donoghue

98. “Sometimes love is a pie. There just isn’t enough to go around. Or OK, maybe there is enough love, but not enough time and attention, so you have to grab your piece, and then the pie smashes and you’re fighting for crumbs...”

— Emma Donoghue

99. “A strident female voice causes men’s ears to close.”

— Emma Donoghue

100. “Ma knows everything except the things she doesn’t remember right, or sometimes she says I’m too young for her to explain a thing.”

— Emma Donoghue