"This biography, written with a novelist’s stylization, was an incendiary moment in western culture. Ironically, it became the weapon that would win the cultural wars for dispossessed black, urban America. It’s impossible to think of what street culture of white Hollywood would look like without it. Slim is the most influential writer in English since Shakespeare."

"If David Lynch is the American take on surrealism, this is the Soviet take. Iranians share a lot of cultural references with people from Armenia, and seeing this, I almost saw a path through Iranian culture. The movie juxtaposes surreal elements from my culture without going through a Western gaze. It has some of the most amazing imagery I’ve ever seen."

"All of Pasolini’s films are very surprising and impressive because they come from somebody with a deep culture who, through cinema, managed to remove himself from that culture. It’s as if he took culture off and, naked, went and walked off into the world. In this film he really succeeded in adhering to the deepest meaning of the text, of the epic narration and storytelling, without adding any element of pathos, psychological feelings, or sentimentalism—which would have been a very easy pitfall. He just tells the story the way it is without adding to it."