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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.

Emma Donoghue

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Emma Donoghue
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: October 24
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Habit
Books
Space
Away
Cambridge
Keep
Housing
Book
Finished
Giving
Soon
Lived

More quotes by Emma Donoghue

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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.
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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.
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I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga.
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I was highly aware, in writing [the book] ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance.
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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.
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At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture
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I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.
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Goodbye, Room. I wave up at Skylight. Say goodbye, I tell Ma. Goodbye, Room. Ma says it but on mute. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
Emma Donoghue
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I was anticipating that some readers might misread [the book] ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.
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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
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We used to call it her Cinderella complex, because often when she had agreed to go out in the evening she would be seized by panic and announce that she had nothing to wear.
Emma Donoghue
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Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.
Emma Donoghue
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And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.
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Everyone's got a different story.
Emma Donoghue
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Stories are a different kind of true.
Emma Donoghue
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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
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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.
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You cannot predict literary success the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.
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When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.
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With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue