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I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They're all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.

I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

As much as we love each other, there is some growing difficulty in my adult relationship with my father. Because we're both writers, we're having a very intimate conversation in a very public forum.

I both admired my father and his writing, and I saw how much he valued it.