People are locked up in all sorts of ways.

I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.

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've always been religiously inclined, but it doesn't come up in most of my books.

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

I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.

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.