Emma Donoghue Quotes

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.

I like going back and writing fiction.

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

My books aren't autobiographical.

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.

I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

Fiction has always been a thorn in my side, because I've always wanted to be a writer but I can't seem to really do it.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

Fiction is a branch of neurology