"The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. It gives you a look into the adversities and fear people are living through in North Korea. It's humbling to learn about another culture."

"I don’t always love Parajanov’s roaming camera in this movie, but he settled down from Color of Pomegranates onwards. Parajanov’s love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate. And the winter mummers are so mysterious. He makes this Hutsul culture come alive and it’s so exotic. Now I know a lot about Carpathian culture and Slavic folklore so the movie doesn’t have a lot of mystery to me anymore. But the first time I saw these images that I couldn’t understand, I was completely conquered because he so clearly understood them [and] they were infused with some kind of meaning that just felt essential to me."

"A fantastic film by Dennis Hopper. A great portrait of punk-rock youth culture in the early eighties, in which, here again, you’re hypnotized by the performance and voice of Linda Manz."

"Throughout my writing life I have relied on Marina Warner to guide me through the hidden realms of literature and culture. She has a wast knowledge of folk stories, religious tracts, legends and classical works from all points of the globe and her analysis of how they continue to be present in our lives and work is always inspiring. In Stranger Magic she tells the story of how Scheherazade’s tales in The Arabian Nights were embraced and appropriated by western culture without ever loosing their original power. As I am working my way towards a new novel which includes the influence of Arabic culture on medieval Icelandic writing Warner has once again provided me with her keen insight into the mechanisms of how stories travel."