I have a great drive to make things and sometimes I forget to slow down a little.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!

That's one thing I find about having children - it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who've had children.

I'm really interested in the minutiae of different tones and what that explains - how people's backgrounds are reflected in minute details of how they interact. It's true that I'm hypersensitive to all that. Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.

It is really hard when the actor you pictured can't do the film.