Books: Inspirations - Novelist A S Byatt

The play

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. It's a passionate play about intellectual thinking, sex and politics. It's got everything - the play in which Shakespeare argued things out. There are greater plays but this one moves me because of the quality of the thought.

The artwork

Matisse's Red Studio which is in the MOMA in New York. It moves me because it's an image of the inside your head when you are arranging your thoughts. Every time I go to look at it, which is every time I go to New York, I stand in front of it to see if I've remembered it right and more and more frequently my memory image corresponds with the reality, but never quite, so it's always a shock.

The film

I'm not a great film person. The film that I love the most is The Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa. I've just been in Japan and the Japanese say that it's a Western film made in Japan. I think it's the combination of a Western style of drama and Japanese emotion - it's one of the very few films where I forget anything except watching the emotions of the people.

The place

Filey Bay on the North Yorkshire coast between Scarborough and Bridlington. We spent our summer holidays there as children, before and immediately after the war. I've tried to write about other seashores but they always get transmuted into that one because that is my image of where the land meets the sea. It's also the place where Charlotte Bronte first saw the sea.

The music

Given the choice, I prefer silence to music but Das Rheingold by Wagner makes me both think and feel passionately. I've always been obssesed by Norse mythology. Wagner said that there had to be one note to each word. The words that Wagner wrote are in a way as important as the music.

I dislike the words inspired and creative: I think influence is a much better word. The form and the content of all these things causes me to think about the nature of thinking and writing.

A S Byatt's `Elementals' is published by Chatto, pounds 12