In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, those churchwomen gossiping about what they would do to Hester - not mark her clothes but brand her forehead, or kill her - would later drive me to make sexual explicitness and sexual minorities features of many of my novels.

Melville's Moby-Dick - particularly, Queequeg and his coffin/life buoy - taught me that foreshadow is the storytelling companion to fate.

As for fate, and how you can't escape yours: Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is pretty harsh. A guy sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in the first chapter; he can never atone for that. And Hardy's critics wanted him to write more uplifting endings!

When I first read Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I was some years away from being married, and still a few years away from imagining I ever would be. What did the adulteries and suicide of a doctor's wife in provincial France matter to me? A lot. As my first editor once said to me, "I've known a number of adulterous women." (I didn't doubt that he had.) "But the one I know best, and will never forget, is Emma Bovary."

As for Dickens - well, yes, Great Expectations is his best novel. But, for sheer drama, nothing tops the "Tempest" chapter in David Copperfield - Steerforth's body washing ashore, and Copperfield saying "I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school".

In Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, a great writer is as endangered by his repressed passions as he is by the cholera plague. I was a young fiction writer who wanted to be an artist at what I did. Why wouldn't I be interested, as Mann was, in the nature of the artist?

I was still too young to drive a car when I read James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. The concept of a devastating and doomed love story - one that was also modern ' hadn't occurred to me. I thought nothing would ever compare to Romeo and Juliet, but Baldwin's story of "the night that is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life" became the saddest love story I know.

I was older - a college student - when I read the Gunter Grass novel The Tin Drum. The 19-century novel was the model of the form, for me; here was 19th-century storytelling about 20th-century social behavior, sexuality, and politics.

I had a similar experience with the Garcia Marquez novel A Hundred Years of Solitude. In miraculous Macondo, the ordinary and supernatural are entwined; incest and intermarriage give many generations of the Buendia family a classically Greek and predestined future.

In the Robertson Davies novel Fifth Business, that first-chapter snowball gave me the idea for the baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany, whose initials (O.M.) are modeled on the Grass hero of The Tin Drum (Oskar Matzerath). When I was married in Toronto, Davies read from the Bible at the wedding. "There is something of Byron about John Irving," Davies once wrote about me. Yes, I suppose so, and something of Dickens about Robertson Davies.