Emma Healey Quotes

Emma Healey

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 27, 1985

There are lots of things going on for teenagers, with exam stress, changing friendship groups, becoming independent, and all those hormone changes affecting you.

Emma Healey

Writing is the thing that pervades my whole day - I'm always wondering how I might describe something or improve my understanding. I'm constantly trying to remember an eavesdropped conversation or an idea for a story.

Emma Healey

I think I'm too scatty.

Emma Healey

While I was writing 'Elizabeth Is Missing' and struggling with the intricacies of the plot, I told myself the next book would be really simple and linear, and I'd have it all worked out before I set down a single word.

Emma Healey

People always want to give you advice about parenting. People who you've never met before will tell you you're doing something wrong. And it's quite similar in writing. People forget that you're a human; they just want to give you their advice.

Emma Healey

I feel like Mills and Boon saved my life. It was a way of not living. I read a lot of other books as well, but they were definitely the best for just switching my brain off, not having to deal with reality.

Emma Healey

Sometimes people ask, 'If you'd never had a reader, would you carry on writing?' No.

Emma Healey

It's a slow process rewriting your own life in your head. I think that's a writerly thing.

Emma Healey

Reading about what a digital native thinks of the Internet is like reading about what it's like to blink: it's kind of boring.

Emma Healey

If you work hard at something, you can forget everything else.

Emma Healey

I have a study at the back of the house, overlooking our garden. It's tiny, just wide enough to fit my desk in. The walls are covered with pin boards and art postcards from galleries all over the world, including Tate, MoMA, and Lenbachhaus.

Emma Healey

I really admire Ana Mendieta. She was a Cuban American artist who died the year I was born and whose work examines violence, feminism, and belonging. Her art is always brave and visually arresting and vibrates with meaning.

Emma Healey

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Emma Healey

I had tried to write about young women in London who had jobs and boyfriends, and it was so tedious.

Emma Healey

I had so many people in my family with dementia that it felt like it belonged to me in a way. I feel like the same with teenage depression because I went through it. I feel like I'm allowed to write about it; it's mine.

Emma Healey

I used to go to the gym with one of my best friends, and we seemed to have the same conversation over and over again. I was always saying, 'I'm still not pregnant, and I still haven't worked out what I'm writing,' and her answer to both was always, 'Just relax!'

Emma Healey

I was very worried about whether I could do it or not. I mean, how arrogant - here I am in my 20s trying to write from the point of view of a woman in her 80s.

Emma Healey

Several members of my family have, or have had, one form of dementia or another. I really wanted to explore what it might like in fiction, but I didn't know how to start.

Emma Healey

I can trace my interest in modern classics to the summer before art college.

Emma Healey

I found 'The Face Of Another' by Kobo Abe disappointing despite the excellent, gothic premise: a man who's terrible facial scarring leads him to create a perfect mask.

Emma Healey