Most scientists do. Of course there are the classical figures. I might talk about Einstein a little bit, for example. Now, when I was in college, I was taking my second course in physics, I remember very well, and it had a chapter on relativity. And I took this relativity on a vacation in the mountains; my family went with me. And I remember very well sitting on a rock up in the hills there overlooking a stream, reading this relativity derivation. And it was just very exciting and interesting. It was a strange new world, relativity. I even thought I had found where Einstein made a mistake. And I went back for lunch, and I thought about it, came back. And I said, “No, he was right after all,” but it was still very exciting. To see a completely different kind of idea and world from what one’s normal intuition shows. Of course, Einstein was one of the great scientists; I’ve always admired him. I fortunately had a chance to talk with him and interact with him a little bit as well.

Jim Lawson. Jim Lawson was an unbelievable human being. Born in Ohio. He was a pacifist. He studied Gandhi. He was part of the Methodist Student Movement. He lived in India. He became an organizer for FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

I read Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons , and that book had a tremendous impact on me. It was about a young man who came back to the old village to visit the old people after he had graduated from his university, and he used to be a doctor, and falls in love with a beautiful woman and all that sort of thing. They lived out in the country. When I was writing my first novel, Catherine Carmier — I started writing it in ’58, I think, ’58, ’59 — I knew nothing about writing a novel, and I used that Fathers and Sons as sort of my Bible, my guide. My first novel was about a young man who had been away from the old place, and then returning, and falls in love with a beautiful girl, and he loses her. I was really very much impressed by — influenced by — Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons at that time, but then I started reading other books, of course. I was reading other books at the same time, but that was the book that had the earliest influence on my structure

I liked all the normal kinds of adventure books, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Huck Finn sorts of things. I loved Swiss Family Robinson and that whole period of South Sea adventure movies. I liked westerns. Westerns were very big when I was growing up. When we finally got a television there was a whole run of westerns on television. John Wayne films, directed by John Ford, before I knew who John Ford was. I think those were very influential in my enjoyment of movies.

It can be combining something disparate. With Greenberg , for example, I had the idea with the character and I wanted to make a movie in L.A. and about L.A. Then I put the two things together and that was the movie. With Francis Ha I wanted to do things in black and white, in New York, and with Greta Gerwig. These are the more conscious things.