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.

So much as I enjoy big novels of epic sweep, I often find, say, if they follow several generations, by the third generation, I'm not caring about the people anymore.

I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

Nowadays, 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.

I'm very keen. Adaptations of other people's work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that'd be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it's become one of my favorite genres.

My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

I was anticipating that some readers might misread [the book] ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.