"I saw Juliet when I first landed in the USA; I was sixteen. I said to myself, This business of making movies looks so great—basically this guy is filming his dreams. That’s a racket I must get into!"

"Is it cheating? [Laughs] It’s hard to pick. I wouldn’t necessarily know which. I mean, I love the Goblet of Fire. I don’t know. Maybe the Goblet of Fire. I read those books so quickly when I was a kid, because that whole world was so, like… it took me out of my reality. And I just love magic and I loved that whole world, the creatures, and just how you felt so friendly with all the characters. The way they translated that into movies, I thought was genius. You know when they take a book, and they make it a movie, and you hope that it’s gonna be everything that you hope for and more? To me they just succeeded. I don’t know, I just love them so much. Every time I’m sick I’ll watch a marathon of them and I can repeat all the words."

"At one point, I was transcribing Shattuck’s journals—I don’t know what happened with that, but as a result I feel connected to this book, which explores early 20th century Paris through the artists of the time, in a strangely personal way. Also, it’s about a writer looking at art, which is what I was doing with the 20th Century Art Book, so there’s a thread of what I like about it in the artist’s perception of art—just curating, showing, explaining, unpacking, translating from abstraction."