How has living in New York changed your writing?
New York has become a major character in my books. It took someone else to point that out to me – I thought I would still be writing the same no matter where I was. New York is like a character in You Gotta Have Balls, I’ve written so much about life here. I think the city is fabulous for me as a person. There’s no such thing as something that’s good for a writer or bad for a writer. I think what influences you changes you as a person and that’s what comes out in your work. New York is a city that is very hard to be smug in. There’s always something to undermine you. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a city that forces you to see things you may prefer not to see. It’s not an easy city in that sense. It’s a mixture of people from all walks of life, all ethnicities, all religions, and that’s been a fabulous thing for me as a human being.

What do you hope to achieve when you write?
I hope that what I write moves people. I hope it makes them laugh; I always want to make people laugh. And I don’t mind at all if they cry about what I’ve written as I think there are lots of things in life to cry about.
When people tell me they recognize themselves in something I wrote I’m really thrilled. I’ve had people from such different parts of the world tell me that the father figure in a lot of my books is their father or their grandfather – that’s when I feel that I’ve connected. I’m just trying to connect with people. I don’t actually think about who they are, I just want to connect with somebody by writing as honestly as I can.

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