They were small, semi-plagiarised things that I have lost. I have been influenced equally by writers I love and hate. But Proust, Borges, Calvino and Murnane are the writers whose sentence structures have most impacted on mine. I look for patterns between memory, experience, imagination. Sometimes Ganesh comes if I have hammered down his door, but usually he comes only with weak tea and a Boxer s salts.
Inspiration comes after hard work, be the hard work daydreaming.
Sometimes, not always, I think that every book I will ever write has been written on my soul and my life s work is to follow the thread of muscle, vein, down to find them. My favourite thing to read was The Reader s Digest because it was off limits. I loved the Test Your Vocabulary section, though I used to cheat. My father loves Shakespeare so I was encouraged, sometimes forced, to read great literature from a very early age. That is, when the residing muse finds for you the words your life depends upon.