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I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him.

The other guy I dug a lot was Burroughs because he was a smart man already; he learned it through the druggie pool - the street scene of an old aristocratic kind of man.

In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business.

Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.

I read a lot of detective novels.

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

Burroughs was never really that pleased with the way popular culture and society treated his character. He tried to make a few movies of his own as a result, but they weren't very good.

P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.