The novelist on being inspired by the Beats, discovering Chekhov, and taking notes from Pierre Boulez
Sam Byers … ‘My joy in writing has never waned.’Like many people who go on to have an overactive imagination, I was unwell as a child. I remember long weeks at home, in bed or with a duvet on the sofa, reading whatever I could get my hands on. My childhood hero was Tintin – so many frames from those books are indelibly imprinted on my mind. I also reread Roald Dahl’s The Witches again and again – despite, or perhaps because of, the nightmares it gave me.
at 18 and set off for Asia, where I spewed forth a torrent of unpunctuated and unreadable spontaneous thought. My writing has changed profoundly since, but my joy in the doing of it, which the Beats instilled, has never waned.in which he said that Anton Chekhov is not a writer the young can readily understand. I felt sure at the time that I could understand anything I wanted, but this year I dipped back into Chekhov and saw exactly what Ford meant.