Influences are important, not just to creatives, but to everyone. You’re a businessman? Donald Trump. A mathematician? Newton. A teacher, plumber, construction worker? Someone before you inspired you to be the best you can be or to just get by; shaped your way of thinking and approaching this bitch called life.

There are a lot of works that inspired me, individually. BE — both the CD and the performance DVD — by Pain of Salvation. L.A. STORY by Steve Martin. CHOKE by Chuck Pahlaniuk. King’s DARK TOWER cycle. But artists in their fields that have inspired me, both through their works and their lives and thoughts — very few. Count ’em on one hand, I can. Steve Vai. Devin Townsend. Both of them in music… In film, it’s more moments or stories or unique performances, though Johnny Depp in recent years has started to have more and more of those.

But as authors go, there’s but one write who seems to ceaselessly inspire me, both on a creative level as well as in life. If you need a good place to start, track down a copy of Available Light.

Warrenellis.com � Stories, Drinking And The World: “I sit down every day to tell myself a story. Usually full of either stimulants or depressants, playing some kind of soundtrack to the experience of writing, aware of my environment, sitting in my own little writer�s movie and telling myself a story. Anyone who tells you they write to an audience is either an idiot or a fake. You write for yourself. If the story doesn�t affect you in some way, it won�t affect anybody else. I don�t write for the trunk. I�m well aware that someone else is going to read this. But if I don�t respond in some honest, gut way to whatever I�m writing, you�ll never get to see it.” [much more in link]