Books: Inspirations - Novelist Andrew Miller

The music

My mother's singing. It was mostly light opera - Gilbert and Sullivan - and she sang while she cooked. It's a voice I'm happy to be haunted by!

The play

When I was 12 years old I played Cobweb in A Midsummer Night's Dream. We did the play just before the summer holidays. The combination of Shakespeare, incipient adolescence and the long holidays produced a powerful, nourishing memory.

The place

Nailsea Moor and the Iron Age Cadbury Camp west of Bristol. My father lived in a village here and I used it as part of the setting for my first novel, Ingenious Pain. From Cadbury Camp you can see the Severn and the mysterious islands, Steep Holme and Flat Holm.

The film

Federico Fellini's Satyricon. The classical world he creates is utterly convincing. He makes the past both weird and familiar.

The artwork

When I first saw Chagall's paintings in Amsterdam I was 18 and without funds or much sense. Those paintings seemed to point the way forwards for me.

Andrew Miller's novel `Casanova' is published on 7 September (Sceptre)