"Probably the most important influence on me becoming a writer was my parents, who both read voraciously and who both write. My father is a scientist with hundreds or even thousands of publications to his name, and my mother an artist who works in paper and incorporates her writing into her work. Our house was always full of books, and there was a culture of reading."
This "culture of reading" carried over to the outside world, as well. A loyal patron of the Canberra Public Library Service, Nix visited the children's library section daily. Located between his home and school, this children's library introduced Nix to the works of Ursula Le Guin, Robert Heinlein, John Masefield, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Stewart, Madeleine L'Engle, Isaac Asimov, and a host of other writers. Nix recalled that this children's library "was very much the best place of my six-to-ten-year-old life, other than my home." A self-declared "bookworm," Nix would generally rather read a novel than do school homework. "But I wasn't the solitary type. I had a good bunch of friends and was OK at playing sport, though it never really interested me. The only sport that captured my imagination at school was fencing, which I did for a year, till it was discontinued after a foil broke and nearly skewered a student."
At age seventeen, Nix joined the Australian Army Reserve, serving one weekend a month and about one month a year out in the bush.
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