Which writers or artists most influenced your work?

Originally asked

The Paris Review, to novelists and poets, The Art of Fiction

A durable Art of Fiction question asked through named literary influences and artistic models.

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Recorded David McCullough said elsewhere, not written here
We had the classics, published by Scribners, all the great stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest which were illustrated by the great N.C. Wyeth. In those days, when childhood diseases were extended, you were home with the measles or mumps or chicken pox for two or three weeks at a time, and you were supposed to stay in bed. There wasn’t any television, there wasn’t much to do, so I would stare at those paintings in those books by the hour. I didn’t read them all. I loved to just look at those pictures and study every detail. I could sit down and draw most of those pictures right now without having to refresh my memory because they were so exciting to me.

Academy of Achievement interview, Williamsburg, Virginia, 3 June 1995 source ↗

Others on this question

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Ferdinando Cito Filomarino Film director and screenwriter
Actually, I started falling in love with the films of Brian De Palma. He was the first filmmaker I ever loved, he always made genre films. They touched me more, they felt warm, and human, and unsettling. There was always his vision behind them.
Recorded The Talks, published interview, 19 September 2021 source ↗
Adam Gopnik Staff writer at The New Yorker; essayist
Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.
Recorded On Being, interviewed by Krista Tippett, 21 December 2017 source ↗
Marco Brambilla Video artist and film director
Yeah, of course! I think they made that way back in like 1968 with an optical printer where they had to keep shooting each section. It was made for IBM. The idea of virtual travel versus physical travel, the idea of exploration.
Recorded The Talks, published interview, 28 January 2015 source ↗
Norman Foster Architect; founder of Foster + Partners and winner of the Pritzker Prize
They were the great architects who have gone before. So they were architects like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright. Of course, they were alive at the time that I was studying. But there were also, for me, not just buildings.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, London, England, 18 October 2017 source ↗

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Rashid Johnson, George Lucas, Adam Gopnik, Gertrude B. Elion, Kiri Te Kanawa, Olivia de Havilland

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