Emma Donoghue Quotes

I don't want to be held down by genres so much.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

Music is such an intensely personal thing for me, and I knew if I was going to do it, it would be in my own way.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

If I only acted, I feel like I wouldn't have enough creative expression over my own sensibility, and also if I only acted, the notion of surrendering my fate and future to other people is deeply unsettling to me and it would make me uncomfortable.

You know I've had work banned.

I never do anything to strictly satisfy a fickle, ever-changing commercial world. I do the music I like to play. It's the only way I feel comfortable existing in the industry.

My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I'm ahead or behind the curve, that's for others to decide.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I feel fortunate about being able to make the music I want to make and getting away with it.

Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

I never want to be in a position where I have to defend my material. It's too subjective. It's for other people to defend or not defend.

I think that was the whole idea behind doing the solo record was to be able to do musically whatever I wanted to do.

We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it... because you cannot compromise an artist's vision.

There's not a lot of art forms where you can control your presentation and your ideas.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that's all me.

I must say here in France I had more serenity or security as I was working because I knew I was making the film the way I wished and that the film would be seen, ultimately, which is not always the case in Iran. In Iran, you always work having in mind this worry of will I be able to carry on my project as I wish and will the audience see the film.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

Honestly, I never felt like I wasn't an artist on my own. I always felt like the music I made was mine, whether it was part of a collaboration with people.