"Actually, a great book is Billy Idol's book (Dancing With Myself). I don't consider it a rock memoir, though. That guy is such a deep figure. It's a deep, self-searching book about his life, his motorcycle accident and just all the crap he went through. I knew that he wrote it himself without help and that really impressed me. I know Billy a little bit. I really look up to him. I was hoping that it was going to be good. It was. Right away, in the foreword, it seemed he found his writing voice."

"Once Upon a Time in the West would come on the million-dollar movie. We had that once a week, I think, when everything was deployed on television. I had a [inaudible] television and I watched Once Upon a Time in the West, and I was blown away by the power in the stillness and silence of Charles Bronson as Harmonica, and I just thought the culmination of Morricone’s score with Leone’s gorgeous style, and then the showdown between Henry Fonda, who is outstanding as a bad guy, and Bronson was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in cinema, and it really made a big impact."

"It could be 8½. I mean, 8 ½ to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act if filmmaking and creativity. And you can probably link it with Stardust Memories, because I love the way that Woody [Allen] did a take on it as well. I mean, it’s a little bit of a self examination of the act of making a film. [Reels off another long list of films] Apu. That’d be my fifth, if I didn’t get a fifth one. Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy — I just love those films; the way he uses scenery to create close-ups and wides, and just the emotion of it."