The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.

What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I'm not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.

In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.

The idea was to focus on the primal drama of parenthood: the way from moment to moment you swing from comforter to tormentor, just as kids simultaneously light up our lives and drive us nuts. I was trying to capture that strange, bipolar quality of parenthood. For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have.

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.

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