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My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.

I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too.

My father was a screenwriter, but he was also a novelist.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

My mother is a beautiful writer. Writing letters back and forth with her was an athletic endeavor, and it became something I really looked forward to.

Dahl was my favorite author as a child. When I got older, I discovered his adult stories and fell even more in love with him.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.