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Given Ethan Hawke's talent, he could have Hollywood for breakfast if he wanted. But being big at the box office has never been his priority - he would much rather be remembered for his novels than his acting.

The morning after my meeting in New York with Ethan Hawke I happened to see him again on the American breakfast television show Regis and Kelly. Hawke, the star of such films as Reality Bites, Snow Falling On Cedars and Training Day, was ostensibly appearing in his other guise as a novelist, to talk about his new book Ash Wednesday.

But nobody ever went broke underestimating the lowest common denominator of American breakfast TV. Hawke, who had the misfortune to be immediately preceded by a 'hunky husbands' contest - firemen, fitness instructors and mechanics posing in Speedos - had recently returned from China, where his wife Uma Thurman (delirious audience applause) had been filming - a cue for much banter about the size of Thurman's breasts at the last Oscar ceremonies (she was nursing their new-born son, Roan, at the time). Hawke's attempts to talk about the themes of his novel - marriage, growing up, maturity - were swiftly brushed aside. 'Did you show it to anyone before you wrote it?' he was asked - code for, 'Does Uma like it?' Hawke said no, he didn't, but yes, he hoped she did, all the while smiling and joshing good-naturedly in a way that confirmed just how convincing an actor he can be.

'Celebrity author' is a phrase which, under normal circumstances, is guaranteed to make the heart sink, and when Hawke published his first novel, The Hottest State, in 1996, it received the sort of sardonic welcome you might expect. Entertainment Weekly speculated that 'somewhere between astronauts walking on the moon and poodles walking on their hind legs lies the accomplishment of actors writing books'.

Newsweek grudgingly acknowledged it as 'one of the least pretentious things ever written by someone with a goatee'. In fact, having a goatee is one of the lesser crimes that Hawke has been accused of. Some people get criticised for behaving too much like stars. Hawke seems to get criticised for not behaving enough like one. He has been taken to task for his careless, shambolic dress; for not running with the Hollywood pack; for taking himself too seriously; for being 'pretentious'. For his part, Hawke has always seemed a little uneasy, if not with the business of acting then certainly with the mixed blessings it may bring - a man with the good grace to be embarrassed by fame, and to realise its attendant contradictions and absurdities.

Hawke's eagerness to distance himself from Hollywood and its conventions is apparent even before you meet him. For one thing, he lives in New York. For another, he appears sufficiently secure in himself to dispense with the metaphorical razor-wire of flunkies and PRs.

He had suggested we meet at one of his regular haunts, a low-rent Mexican restaurant next door to the Chelsea Hotel. The choice of venue seemed indicative. The Chelsea is a famously bohemian establishment; it is also the oblique subject of an experimental film, Chelsea Walls, about four characters living in the hotel, which Hawke directed two years ago.

Hawke, 31, is sitting alone at the restaurant bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking a soda. Movie stars tend to shrink in real life and Ethan Hawke is no exception. He is a slightly built man, dressed down in jeans and a nondescript sports shirt, with straggly, uncombed hair, a wispy moustache and, yes, a goatee. What immediately strikes you about him is his openness. There is nothing guarded or pretentious about him. Rather, he bubbles with an engagingly boyish enthusiasm for life.

Ash Wednesday, his second novel, tells the story of the relationship between Jimmy Heartsock and his girlfriend, Christy, a nurse. Jimmy is a soldier, 29 going on 16, a man so self-preoccupied and absorbed that he can't pass a reflective surface without checking it, 'to see if I'm still here or else I'm wishing I was somebody else.' Not only is his military career going nowhere, but he is also stalled at an emotional crossroads, torn between his old life of drinking and womanising with his friends and committing himself to a life with Christy. She falls pregnant, and wary of bearing the responsibility of two infants (the one she is carrying, and Jimmy) she takes off for the sanctuary of her childhood home in Texas, with Jimmy in hot pursuit.

There is always a temptation to see novels as disguised autobiography, in their themes if not in the particulars. But Hawke's two books seem more explicitly autobiographical than most. The Hottest State, written when he was 25, tells the story of William, a young actor from a broken home running around Greenwich Village, falling desperately in love, then taking off to make a movie in Europe.

Hawke, too, comes from a broken home, and when he wrote The Hottest State he had just finished making a movie in Europe. The book also addresses some of the questions about the meaning of celebrity which one imagines Hawke was wrestling with at the time. 'I saw any success I had as an actor,' says William, 'as the mark of my greatest character flaw. The one thing I was good at was pretending to be someone else. I was disappointed there was a market for it.'

Jimmy in Ash Wednesday is also from a broken home. He is exactly the age Hawke was when he wrote the book. And as Hawke readily admits, the questions Jimmy is wrestling with, about manhood, maturity and marriage, are an accurate mirror of Hawke's own feelings on falling in love with and eventually marrying Uma Thurman.

Hawke and Thurman first started going out together in 1996, after meeting on the set of Gattaca. They married in 1998, and have two children, a four-year-old daughter, Maya Ray, and a seven-month-old son, Roan. Hawke says that getting married was 'a much bigger event in my life than I had anticipated. First of all I didn't really plan it. I wasn't one of those guys who can't wait to be married. I didn't really know whether I could be dedicated to some-body else. For me really trying to love another human being brought up all the other questions about - why are you alive, what do you believe in, what are you living for, what is your life committed to? It's also the first time you start feeling yourself age. Turning 30... you start feeling, oh shit, I'm not going to be a kid for ever; you start having this sense of accountability.'

What marriage has brought him, he suggests, is a sense of 'authenticity' that was lacking in his life. 'When you get put on the cover of a magazine for saying a couple of lines in a movie, it's easy to be overwhelmed with a sense of fraudulence. It can lead you to feel like such a liar, just knowing you don't deserve it, but at the same time your feelings can be hurt when people criticise you. And the thing about getting married and having kids is that I don't worry about that any more. There is something deeply authentic in looking after a kid. They really do root you. And the rest of it is so...' He shrugs. 'Irrelevant.'

'Authentic' is a word Ethan Hawke uses a lot in conversation. 'To me, this book was like a shedding of a skin. You have to really figure out what it is you're rooting your identity in. Speaking personally, I certainly struggled with this 13-year-old's idea of what a man is. But if sleeping with lots of women and having cool masculine possessions don't make me a man, then what does? I totally get it that these things are superficial, but what isn't superficial? What is authentic? One of the ways to answer that is to simply try to love another human being. So I tried to come up with a story that could be a crucible for those kind of ideas.'

This theme of the struggle between arrested adolescence and manhood is a familiar one. But Hawke writes with real insight, and a winning mixture of toughness and tenderness. He is particularly good at describing the interior lives of characters who are suffering from a surfeit of conflicting emotions, struggling to articulate their feelings about the world and themselves. And it seems no coincidence that the final chapter is entitled The Middle Way - the term used to describe the Buddhist teaching of following a path between the two extremes of sensual pleasure and mortification; but which Hawke uses to describe Jimmy's final reconciliation of the conflict in his own mind between the freedom of being single and the commitment of marriage.

'There's a line in the book,' says Hawke - talking, you guess, as much about himself - 'where Jimmy says, I have to stop thinking about whether this is a right marriage or a wrong marriage and just realise that I did this, I married this person, and this is our marriage. Because if you start thinking about the long-term projections that's when you really feel trapped. If you think, do I want to be married to this person today? Yeah, all right! One day at a time.'

Like a recovering alcoholic, he means?

He laughs. 'Exactly. And trying to pursue the best version of yourself hour by hour.'

In the book, the most eloquent grace-note on the subject of marriage is sounded by Christy's friend, Chance. Being married, Chance says, is 'utter agony... You will give all you have to give, and it won't be enough. You will resent him and feel he has single-handedly ruined your life, and - worse than that - you will be correct. He will resent you and take all your gifts for granted. For the life of you, you will not be able to remember how you could have fallen in love with this lazy, self-absorbed creep... And then one Christmas, you'll be driving slowly through a snowstorm, both of you not speaking 'cos you're petrified the car is gonna slide off the road, but you'll make it home. You'll start laughing and kissing, and then you'll realise that all this time while you've been grouchy and complaining you haven't actually looked him in the eye, and when you do you'll recognise the best friend you've ever known and you won't be able to believe that all this time he was sitting right beside you.'

Reading this, you think that Ethan Hawke is nothing if not a romantic. 'Well,' he shrugs and smiles, 'that's true...' This thing about men and women, he says, 'that more than anything is what sparks my curiosity. There's a line in The Hottest State where William is talking about his mother and father, and he's wondering how other men in general behave when they're alone with women. And for me certainly there's an easiness about being around men. But to me there has always been something so charged about being alone in a room with a woman, and how are you supposed to behave. I've always been kind of fascinated by that.'

And has he figured it out? Hawke smiles. 'I'm working on it.'

Hawke was just 14 when he made his first film, The Explorers, in 1985 with River Phoenix. But it was his appearance four years later in Dead Poets Society, playing a tortured young student opposite Robin Williams's unbearably hammy English professor, that properly announced his arrival.

His roles in Reality Bites and Before Sunrise saw him hailed as the hero of the Nineties 'slacker sensibility' - a mixture of the sensitive and streetwise, all self-deprecating manner, flannel shirts and crooked teeth. But Hawke was careful to avoid stereotyping, as his thoughtful and measured performances in Snow Falling On Cedars and Gattaca have proved. Contemporaries such as Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio might have been bigger box-office stars, but that has never appeared to be Hawke's priority. He has directed videos and films; for a short while he ran his own theatre company, Malaparte. And he has never been afraid to put his film career on hold. In 1993 he took a year out to study English at university in New York. Two years later, he took time out to complete The Hottest State, and again to write Ash Wednesday.

When he first started writing The Hottest State a couple of writer friends - 'very serious guys' - took him to one side and warned him 'not to half-ass it. They said, the world does not need you thinking that your half-baked ideas are of any interest. If you're going to write a book, write it. Their criticism has always stayed in my mind.'

He began writing Ash Wednesday three years ago. At first he worked in between acting commitments. 'But then finally I felt I've got to take some time and finish it.' He pauses. 'Actually, I've missed some great acting opportunities to do this book.'

What he wants to convey - desperately, you sense - is that writing is not some kind of whim or indulgence. 'If somebody got something back from this book, it would mean a lot more to me than if somebody liked a particular performance I'd given in a film. 'I don't want to be over-dramatic,' he says, coming perilously close to being just that, 'but I feel I would die if I weren't allowed to write.'

Writing, he says, has 'dramatically changed' his relationship with acting. From the age of 13, when he first started working in community theatre, until the age of 25 when he wrote The Hottest State, acting was 'my only means of expression. So you take roles that kind of tie into what you're thinking about.' He pauses, and sets off another tack. 'Also, when it comes to directors... The funny thing about acting is that you have to get hired. And directors really like actors without too many ideas.'

So have arguments with directors been a problem?

'Not arguments. You just don't get hired. "This guy thinks he can write a book? I don't want to work with him." ' And does he think that has weighed against him? 'Ah, I think so, yes. I'm not complaining about it. I think it's true that I've been less passionate about acting since having this other avenue.'

The irony, as he admits, is that to outward appearances he has had 'probably my best year ever' as an actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the box-office hit Training Day, and won critical praise for his appearances in two Richard Linklater films, Tape and Waking Life - the sort of low-key, experimental arthouse films which you would guess he actually prefers. But all these were made some time ago. Hawke has not made a film for 18 months, and has no immediate plans to make another.

He thinks about this, frets again that his concentration on writing might have 'dissipated all my energies' as an actor. 'Maybe I could have been a really great actor, and I've blown that by doing these other things...' He exhales a plume of cigarette smoke. 'But you can only be yourself really.'

His heroes - his role models if you like - are Sam Shepard and John Cassavetes, both actors who were able to diversify into directing, writing plays and books, and Allen Ginsberg. 'To be publicly gay in the Fifties, then to be a Buddhist, and go on TV shows and do chants and everybody thinking you're an idiot and not really care. That's a real lesson to me.'

Hawke, it's apparent, is very conscious of being 'a member of the artistic community', and all it entails. 'I am,' he nods his head seriously. 'But I worry about saying it, because I know it sounds so pretentious. But I also think, if you're not serious about yourself who the hell else is gonna be for you?'

Hawke, an only child, was born in Texas. His parents had married young; his father was 19, his mother 17; his father had not even graduated from college when the marriage ended. Hawke was just three. He and his mother spent the next few years moving between Connecticut, Vermont and Georgia, until she remarried when Hawke was 10 and settled in New Jersey. The confusions of coming from a broken home, the search for reconciliation between child and lost parent is an abiding theme in his novels, the central protagonists in each, both male and female, all coming from disrupted childhoods.

His feelings towards his own absent father, a mathematician, oscillated between deep longing and equally deep resentment. 'When I was young my father was a hero beyond heroes, because it's so easy to love somebody who's not present - that thing of, "if they were here, this wouldn't be happening". And then getting older I really resented him and felt totally abandoned. But intellectually, it's hard for me to harbour any real anger. And now knowing how hard raising children is, and how hard it is to get along with a woman, I have a lot more empathy than I did when I was 21.'

Now, he says, he can see his father in himself. He was recently shocked to notice that although he didn't grow up with his father, their handwriting is identical. 'Also, I have this bizarre ability to completely space out. The other day, my daughter was waving her hand in front of my eyes, going "Hello?" And I remembered doing exactly the same thing to my dad.' Growing up, it seems that everybody he has ever been close to came from similar backgrounds to himself - 'it was all about, my dad killed himself, or died of alcoholism, or my mother abandoned me. All my closest friends dealt with those kind of issues'.

Marriage to Uma Thurman has introduced him to the novelty of a nuclear family, albeit a somewhat unconventional one. Thurman's father, Robert, was the first Westerner ever to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, after travelling to India in the early Sixties, and meeting the Dalai Lama. He gave up his robes after a few years, and is now the professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York. Thurman's mother Nena is a psychotherapist, who was formerly married to the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary (who was Uma's godfather until his death six years ago).

Hawke says he is particularly excited that his own children will grow up with grandparents who are so remarkable in their own right, 'because if you've got an actor and an actress as your mum and dad, there's going to be a lot of problems going along with that'. He clearly adores them both. '[Robert] doesn't go and see movies. His first comment to me was, "You're an actor? I hope you're not too vain." ' Hawke laughs. 'I think for a long time he only witnessed me in relation to, am I making his daughter happy? And then a couple of months ago he read this book, and he loved it, and our whole relationship has changed. He's got a phenomenal mind.'

Just recently Hawke has been immersing himself in Buddhism, listening to his father-in-law's tapes, reading the Dhammapada. He's thinking about his next book, maybe something about 'the big questions and how they relate to day-to-day living'. He pauses and lights another cigarette.

'Really,' he says, 'it's the only thing worth talking about.'