"Love Liza, it’s such a random thing. I saw it — I can’t remember if my buddy bought it at a DVD store or it was on NYU TV or something — but I remember watching it and just being so transfixed by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance. I just really love that movie a lot. Honestly man, I think that was one of the first independent films I’d seen. I wasn’t huge into the independent film scene until I went to college, and then of course, once you get to NYU, it’s all about the indie scene, you know. But I love independent filmmaking; I think they’re really telling the interesting stories."

"This is another book I read in high school when I could not have possibly understood it. I read the whole thing, too, all seven volumes of it. I don’t know who I was trying to impress. At the time, I felt very sophisticated in figuring out that Charlus was gay and the first thing I did when I went to Paris was to go to a bakery and eat a madeleine. I’m still determined to read Proust’s epic depiction of society again. The newest translation sits on my desk but I think I’ll stick with my old Moncrieff. I’ve had a date with it since high school."

"This is a record that got me through quite a difficult point with The Verve. I was expecting my daughter at the time and we were recording A Storm In Heaven at Sawmills in Cornwall. It was pretty remote. We'd polished off a bottle of wine at dinner and we were smoking quite a lot as well. I just needed to go and get my head together for an hour before I went back to making the record and this was the album I listened to. I see it as a very ecstatic and comforting record. And I've played it to people since and the reaction seems to be, "This is terrifying!" But I really don't see that at all. To me it was just disappearing into something for an hour that was heavenly and ecstatic, which was exactly what I needed. I was conflicted and worrying about my future – whether I was doing the right thing. For a long time I had this feeling that what I was doing was a complete joke and I'd be exposed as a charlatan. There was a general sense of paranoia – that working class thing. Lots of people around me were saying get a proper job. My thinking on the whole thing was that it was all going to end rather badly, which wasn't really conducive to being creative. The album was a freebie from Virgin, and it had a huge comforting effect on me."