The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.

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

I say "on principle" [regarding 'lesbian writer'] because whenever you get one of your minority labels applied, like "Irish Writer," "Canadian Writer," "Woman Writer," "Lesbian Writer" - any of those categories - you always slightly wince because you're afraid that people will think that means you're only going to write about Canada or Ireland, you know.

I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.

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.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

I was highly aware, in writing [the book] ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance.