Emma Healey Quotes

Emma Healey

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 27, 1985

I like to go for walks on Wandsworth Common and feed the ducklings.

Emma Healey

A boyfriend made me a hammock in Richmond Park once. That was lovely - although I ended up getting a tick on my stomach from the deer.

Emma Healey

I spend a ridiculous amount on pots, lilacs, and alliums.

Emma Healey

I tried to help a shirtless man who was being arrested in Starbucks. He obviously wasn't right in the head, but the police thought I was trying to make things worse.

Emma Healey

I'm not a writer who thinks about writing only for themselves; I do always have a reader in mind.

Emma Healey

When I was very small, I loved 'Meg And Mog' by Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski. I had all the books and remember going to see the theatre production.

Emma Healey

Ann Radcliffe was an early influence; I devoured her books while I should have been studying for my GCSEs.

Emma Healey

Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' was published while I was trying to work out how to write 'Elizabeth Is Missing,' and reading the story of that impaired amateur detective gave me the licence I needed to attempt one of my own.

Emma Healey

Penelope Fitzgerald never fails to surprise: her language is clever and elegant, her settings are unusual, her characters are unpredictable, and I am always caught out by a line or moment which makes me laugh out loud.

Emma Healey

The characters in a novel are made up, figments of the writer's imagination. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to anyone, and it's not surprising to me either, but knowing this, feeling this, definitely made writing my second book harder.

Emma Healey

I love writing dialogue - it's when I really lose myself in my work. I love reading it, too, when it's good and rings true.

Emma Healey

I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters.

Emma Healey

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

Emma Healey

Although my father's mother, Nancy, has dementia, and her experiences gave me ideas for some of the scenes in the book, it was my mother's mother, Vera, who most influenced the character of Maud. Vera died in 2008, before I'd gotten very far into writing 'Elizabeth Is Missing,' but her voice is very like Maud's.

Emma Healey

Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn't imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I'd written.

Emma Healey

I spent a lot of time researching dementia, read papers on the subject, and also found a lot of dementia diaries on the Internet which were a great help in getting an insight into the disease.

Emma Healey

I was a 20-something woman living in London and didn't want to write about a 20-something woman living in London! It's an area well covered already, and people would probably have thought it was about me. I decided that if I wrote about an 82-year-old dementia sufferer, then no one could mistake it as a memoir.

Emma Healey

I've been surprised that 'Elizabeth is Missing' has been so well received as a crime book. I love mystery stories, and that is what I decided to write.

Emma Healey

When you are in the midst of writing a book, I think it is important to touch base every day. If I wasn't writing something, I would be reading back what I'd already written. I did take a month off writing at one point and found it really difficult to get back into the world I'd created.

Emma Healey