"I first saw this movie when I was a little girl. I was so drawn to Amy Irving, her personal style in this film. I loved this story of a progressive, intelligent, Jewish New Yorker who was so bonded to her grandmother, but not necessarily to her cultural traditions. And what a great romance! There is nothing else like this movie."

"Okay, what else? Oh, The English Patient. These are in no particular order, by the way. I just love a sweeping romance. It’s one of the best scores ever. I love cinematic music. I think music is so important to a film and the music in that film is, to me, pretty perfect. And I love a tragic love story."

"I was listening to a lot of Cuban music and salsa, a lot of Latin music. I worked with Selena on the last thing she recorded. And there was a whole series of Celia Cruz records I loved. I did a duet with her for a Jonathan Demme movie, Something Wild. Her early Cuban records were done with a band called Sonora Matancera; those are really great. Instead of going to rock clubs, I would go to Salsa Meets Jazz downtown and the Corso Ballroom uptown to hear salsa bands. There was lots of dancing. I liked the idea that you were dancing to live music, not just DJs, and grew to really love the music. It opened me up to a lot of sentimentality and feelings that maybe didn’t come naturally to me. I decided I wanted to do a salsa record, which I did in the early ’90s. And I did another one a few years after that. It was a little less strictly salsa, but it was still in that vein, and I had a wonderful time with a huge band, [Rei Momo]. We toured everywhere, and a lot of folks in the United States did not like it at all. Oddly, people in Latin America really liked it, but not because it was their music. For a lot of their rockers in Argentina or Mexico, it was like, “He's playing our parents’ music.”"