Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels

This is one of the great paragraphs (almost a random paragraph) of a very interesting article:

Updike has been a very important writer for me, the one I’ve admired most, read most, and returned to most often. I was deeply touched by his death. I felt that we had conversations unfulfilled – we got to know each other a little in the last six or seven years of his life, and we had a correspondence . . . Great sentence-maker.