Emma Donoghue Quotes

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself.

Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

A book is either autobiography or a novel.

I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

I don't write autobiographically.

I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.

My books aren't autobiographical.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

All autobiography is fiction.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

Good fiction creates its own reality.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.