SOURCE: "An interview with Angus Wilson," in The Iowa Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, Fall, 1972, pp. 77-105.

In the following excerpt, taken from an interview conducted in the fall of 1971, Wilson discusses various writers that have influenced his work, including Charles Dickens, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett.

[McDowell]: You have presented your views on Dickens at considerable length in The World of Charles Dickens. . . . Like Dickens you tend to have one or two characters presented in some detail (especially with respect to their moral choices), surrounded by a group of characters presented from the outside. Dickens illustrates this principle in surrounding Pip, Arthur Clennam, Esther Summerson, and David Copperfield by externally conceived characters. Do you admit to such a principle of organization in your fiction?

[Wilson]: Yes. I have read Dickens since I was very young, and I suppose I have read him more often than any other author; and...