I loved my time growing up in Northern Ireland doing youth drama, that is where it all began for me.

When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic.

I get an awful lot of people coming up and saying they went to school with me. There must have been 80,000 pupils at that school!

In my life, I have made the occasional catastrophic choice, and it's just a case of moving on and learning from it.

A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.

As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.

Big picture, it's amazing to create characters and see them brought to life in the art. And to love that art. But I especially enjoy writing a character with heightened powers that aren't especially useful to him.

I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.