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

People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.

My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.

I really like to keep my palette small but to be very intense, very myopic.

I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.

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.