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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.

Emma Donoghue

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Emma Donoghue
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: October 24
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Life
Hell
Mistress
Results
Crash
Courses
Motherhood
Course
Slave
Sleep
Result
Purpose
Destiny
Found
Room
Book
Rooms
Existentialism

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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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...sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.
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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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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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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 let's you get on with it.
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Kissing a witch is a perilous business. Everybody knows it's ten times as dangerous as letting her touch your hand, or cut your hair, or steal your shoes. What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart?
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything
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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.
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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.
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Everyone's got a different story.
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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.
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Everybody's damaged by something.
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