When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.
Any parent knows how to be the ideal parent.
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.
For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it’s not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you’ll ever have.
The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.
I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.
People are locked up in all sorts of ways.
For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.
The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.
I’m very keen. Adaptations of other people’s work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that’d be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it’s become one of my favorite genres.
Vitamins are medicine for not getting sick and going back to Heaven yet.
You know who you belong to Jack? – Yeah. Yourself. – He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma. p. 261 Room by E Donoghue.
Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.
I tend to be so lost in the work that I don’t notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, ‘Beautiful day, wasn’t it?’ and I’ll say, ‘Was it?’ as I won’t have noticed the real world at all.
Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I’ve had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you’re trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.
She leaped into space, high, higher than she’d ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.
You’re meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there’s a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.
Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.
I’ve always been religiously inclined, but it doesn’t come up in most of my books.