"When I grew a little older my father read me the murder scene in this book and said: This is what violent literature should be like, son. He was right. This is one of the most influential books I’ve read and it affected the writing of my own book. My father gave me a very special feeling about written words"

"I came across this early on in my operatic journey, and to this day it remains one of my favourite recordings and one of my favourite operas. The wonderful thing about Verdi is that, as you get older, it starts to make more and more sense: these fraught relationships between fathers and sons and lovers and friends. He's so profound in his understanding of human relationships. This opera, Don Carlos, is in my opinion a great masterpiece on a Shakespearian level in its defining, most notably, of the father and son dynamic. There's actually a moment when the father contemplates killing his son – I don't know, but I think that has crossed the minds of certain dads. And as well as Domingo and Caballé, Shirley Verrett is on that recording, who is one of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of all time. So everybody is in there at their zenith vocally, and it's a wild ride."

"An example of masterful storytelling that fascinated me growing up. I identified with Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, because we were both children of the army; my father was an army doctor who had served under Lord Mountbatten. On rereading, the setting of the Afghan Wars in the late Victorian era has chilling implications for today. The book is also a reminder that Kipling’s colonialist perspective didn’t blind him to the teeming human drama of India."

"I really love Bicycle Thief. That just reminds me of my relationship with my father. My mother — they were divorced and I was raised mostly by my father. We grew up really poor. Something about that film really strikes a chord in me real deep. I remember [when I first saw it],I think I was in college and I had just left home. It was part of film studies class. We were told to watch it and I remember getting really emotional watching it. I guess it just really struck a chord because it made me realize everything my father had gone through to support us and to be there for us. I just remember that relationship, that father/son relationship and him loving his father so much and the end — his father just constantly trying so hard to support the family and make ends meet, and really not being able to pull it off. Poverty sucks, you know what I mean? And then in the end, him having to kind of resort to something that goes completely against his character, really, in order to provide for his family. And those moments of just pure humiliation, as a man, to try to provide for your family. I remember times like that with my dad and it just really hit close to home. I remember missing my dad because I was in New York. I was away from home for the first time and getting a real clear idea of what my father had gone through to provide for me. I think when you’re in the day-to-day and living it, you don’t have that objectivity, and you’re not able to step back and see the big picture. Then sometimes these really great movies are able to that for you. They’re kind of able to strike these chords in you and illuminate things for you. I think that’s what the Bicycle Thief did for me."