Bruce Wagner

"That's why Castaneda's work meant so much to me. There was such poetry to it, such agonizing tenderness to it."

"My work early on was compared to Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust. I didn't read that book until a few years ago because I had been compared to him so often that I was nervous about reading it."

"The books that I did read, one had a tremendous influence on me, was Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby Stories, which are these ultimately quite poignant and dark stories mirroring Fitzgerald's experience of an alcoholic screenwriter."

"So I read Don Quixote because I'd read a quote from Dostoevsky saying that it was the saddest book ever written. So I was immediately signed on and it was rapturously sorrowful but transcendent at the end."

"There was a book called I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj and I was captivated by that book because it reminded me it had the scent of Carlos Castaneda you see."

"Occasionally I would be forced to read because one of my characters in one of my books was reading Dead Souls by Gogol. So I would read that and adored it."

"Hanif Kureishi is a writer who did My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of the Suburbs was a novel he wrote."

"The Buddha of the Suburbs was a novel he wrote. A wonderful writer."

"There's a magnificent book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. In that book, they talk of vanity, the need to seek attention and approbation is one of the most difficult things to overcome."

"The Black Box book is a transcript of plane crashes and some of them everyone dies."

"I remember I had written a novel called Still Holding that had a character in it a very famous Hollywood star an A-lister who was also a Buddhist someone along the lines of Richard Gere."