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.

...Sometimes I suspect that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.

The paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

I'm very interested in how idealistic young people can get caught up in all sorts of systems of extreme belief, you know, whether it's cults or whether it's suicide bombers.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

The film world is far more male-dominated. I mean, the numbers are staggering at the level of how many people on set there are, and almost all the trades in film, there's a lot more men. So I can see without anyone intending to be biased [that] we have kind of a collective choosing of men's stories and a collective of taking men's stories seriously.

I wrote the novel [Room], and then I thought, "This could work on film, and I want to be the one to do it." So I went ahead and drafted it.