Emma Donoghue Quotes

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.

I don't care what I do - act, stand-up, write, direct - it doesn't matter as long as I'm being creative and it's good work.

As soon as I can afford a studio space, I'll paint again.

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

I like going after good material, well-written material.

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.

I don't have keepsakes from shows, really. It's in the work. It's all there.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.

Art is what we're doing when we do our best work.

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.

It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of painting.