Emma Donoghue Quotes
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'Are stories true?''Which ones?''The mermaid mother and Hansel and Gretel and all them.''Well,' says Ma, 'not literally.''What's-''They're magic, they're not about real people walking around today.''So they're fake?''No, no. Stories are a different kind of true.'
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A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
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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.'
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I'm a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.
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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.
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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.
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When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything.
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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.
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I've always been religiously inclined, but it doesn't come up in most of my books.
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I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.
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Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.
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I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.
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I've been writing full-time since I was 23.
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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.'
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I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
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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.
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Ma: You're gonna love it.Jack: What?Ma: The world.
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Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.
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I'm finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.