It's thanks to Graham Greene I'm an addict

When I was accompanying my mother to South America on a cargo ship aged seven, I decided there was more to life than staring at the sea day after day. So I picked up my first novel, Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene. Henry and his aunt gallivant around the world encountering a series of memorable characters. As Henry became addicted to his new life of adventure, so I became addicted to literature.

Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals transported me to another world - Corfu - and his portrayal of scorpions, toads, ladybirds and glow-worms was far superior to any Disney production. It was only after reading Tarka the Otter, by Henry Williamson, that I realised literature could move you to tears. Much later I discovered it could also instil a sense of foreboding. George Orwell's novel 1984 shaped my fear of the future when I was a teenager. His vision of a totalitarian state resembled rather too closely my own school and stirred me to revolt against authority.

Borges's Labyrinths proved that fact could be combined with fiction to spell-binding effect: his stories about time, illusion and infinity were more magical than any mood-enhancing narcotic in my teens. The seduction scene in The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth opened my innocent eyes to the charms of the French language - "Viens, primitif" were the two sexiest words I would hear in any tongue for years to come. Thank you, Freddie. Unlike my school contemporaries I enjoyed Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and shivered in Magwitch's shadow.

Karel Capek's Letters from England made me see England with fresh eyes, as a foreigner. He observes that in England streets are not where anything happens but they are just used to rush home. I naively used to think magical realism was the preserve of the Latin Americans but then I read Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England and realised the baroque imagination had its origins in Europe.

And all fiction flows from that most baroque of creations Don Quixote, about a man who reads too many books and loses his sanity, imagining he is a knight errant. As Emerson said, there is creative reading as well as creative writing. Books shape us all, whether you are a reader, or a writer, or both.