Emma Donoghue

Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.

Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.

Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.

...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

When I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jumping into the other’s head, like coulouring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

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.

It's all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw an airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can't go there because we don't know the secret code, but it's real all the same. Before I didn't know to be mad that we can't open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it.