My father reading the poems of Ogden Nash. He delighted in silliness, and I delighted in anything he found funny, and so they have stayed vivid since earliest childhood, unlike anything I was later made to memorise at school. At six I learned that “Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker .
Sound advice, even if it came a little early. . I longed also to be left on my own island, alone with only my ingenuity and a feral wolf for company.
It made childhood seem not a time of powerlessness but of such competence and courage. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë did peculiar things to my romantic expectations as a young teenager, from which – it took some time to recover. I think I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I’ve been conscious of imagination, but I read AS Byatt’s at 20 and felt electrified.
She described a lemon in a bowl of plums, and that image hangs in my mind’s eye like a painting. I read and thought, I want to make beauty, just like this. by Salman Rushdie.
I tried too young and failed. Then I moved to New York and listened to Lyndam Gregory’s incredible audio recording and walked and walked, spellbound. I crisscrossed Manhattan just to live inside that book, and I now have the most powerful .
synaesthesia; I can tell you where I stood on the High Line when Rushdie first described the grasshopper-green chutney; I know in which bodega I was buying Swedish Fish when Saleem Senai found out the truth about his identity. by George Eliot is bordering on an.