"Naturally, Alice herself bored me, but the other characters felt like the friends and neighbours I should have had, rather than the people I did know. It took me some time to realise that, secretly, some of the dull folk in my workaday world were actually members of that divine cast of lunatics, and were doing their damnedest to hide it."
"What Peake created was darker, more intricate, at once more sinister and more beautiful than anything else I had read up to that point. At the end, I was left with a powerful impression of the richness of language, of its magical power. As my father would say, people like us didn't become writers, (or musicians, or artists) but Peake made me wonder if writing was maybe worth the risk of honourable failure."
The book that made me want to be a writer John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance, which I read in my early 20s. What beguiled me was its scope, the way it drew pagan magic from the land in a mix of history, myth and a contemporary narrative that nobody else, to my mind, had even at
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