Well, I saw Mies van der Rohe and then I was introduced to Shiro Kuramata’s work and that brought me even further into this world. I’m interested in everything. I mean, Peter Zumthor is obviously very talented, he does interesting work — but I don’t study my contemporaries in architecture and design so much.

Well, naturally, my grandfather. He was a Hasid, meaning a member of the Hasidic community, and I loved him, I adored him. So thanks to him, I became a Hasid too. And my mother — who actually continued his tradition — she’s the one who brought me to Hasidic Masters. And all the stories I tell now — I’ve written so many books with Hasidic tales — these are not mine, these are theirs, my mother’s and my grandfather’s. My father taught me how to reason, how to reach my mind. My soul belonged to my grandfather and my mother. They enriched me, of course. They influenced me profoundly, to this day. When I write, I have the feeling, literally, physically, that one of them is behind my back, looking over my shoulder and reading what I’m writing. I’m terribly afraid of their judgment.

I realized I took ideas from philosophers like Dan Dennett. I took ideas from evolutionary biologists like John Maynard Smith. I took ideas from people who were trying to implement evolution for things like RNA, so people like Jerry Joyce at Scripps. I took ideas from lots of people who could explain their ideas well, so I’ve been influenced by many. I’ve built my ideas on the contributions of many. And, of course, that’s what evolution does. It mutates and recombines what’s already there. Nothing comes out of nothing, right? It all comes on the back of what was there.

I did think about Woody Allen’s movies with Frances Ha because Woody Allen’s movies were also in black and white and very contemporary. Manhattan and Stardust Memories are not period pictures. Particularly in Manhattan you have the grandeur of the black and white and the Gershwin music sort of playing up against a more intimate storyline in which, when you break it down, is really just people sleeping with each other and trying to figure out their lives. But something about the filmmaking and the approach to it makes it feel almost epic. And, ultimately, the concerns of those people are epic. That movie is a masterpiece.

Actually, I had done what I thought was more or less a finished version of The Remains of the Day , but the very buttoned-up narrator, the butler — in that earlier version, he doesn’t quite come through confessing his true emotions. He maintains his front a little bit more effectively than he does in the final version. What made me change my mind was that, between that penultimate version and the final version I handed in, I listened to a song by Tom Waits — another great singer-songwriter, remarkable artist. And this is the power of that art form: it’s performance as well as the actual writing.

The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other characters in an interesting human relationship. And immediately, this next thought came regarding my own work: What if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?

It’s funny you say that because I never have this moment when I feel, “Ah, I’ve finished!” I watch footballers at the end of the match, you know, the whistle goes and they’ve won or lost. Until then they’ve been giving everything and at that moment they know it’s over. It’s funny for an author. There’s never a finishing whistle. It’s not very spectacular.

Like Joel McCrea’s character at the end of the movie Ride the High Country. (He says something about “entering his house justified,” sits up to take a last look at the scenery, then rolls contentedly out of the frame.) Or like Bill Nighy’s character at the end of our film Living.

The urge to be unpleasant to waitstaff in restaurants.

I always dreamt of having a second stomach I could carry around in a bag, which I could attach to my real stomach when I sat down in restaurants. That way, I could eat a huge amount, never gaining weight.