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

There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night.

With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.

Feminism is still one of those taboo words, so hardly anybody talks about it. People usually go gender-neutral and say the book and film [Room] are about "the triumph of the human spirit.

Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.

I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away - meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic but to find a cinematic equivalent.

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 let's you get on with it.