"Amazingly, Joyce basically tells you how to be a writer here, in one of the most dazzling, lucid, visceral memoirs. The passage where he describes standing in the mouth of a shallow, pebbly river, at sunset, having a revelation about the rest of his life, is scientifically provable to get you as high as a quarter of an MDMA tablet. But the modern reader can't help but note that, as a story of a working class adolescent who thinks he's intellectually superior to everyone around him, is desperate to be a writer, and wanks a lot, Portrait of a Young Artist is also incredibly similar to."

"This year has been incredibly hard work. We’re trying to run our own label, we’re touring as much and as often as we can, and there’s very little time to sit and enjoy other people’s efforts. That’s one of the downfalls of things going well—you don’t have time to indulge in other music as much. I require total concentration and involvement to try to grab the atmosphere that an artist is creating—that’s where music holds everything for me, and you can’t get that if it’s in the background whilst you’re brushing your teeth. Maybe that’s the reason why I don’t brush my teeth."

"An incredibly bold portrait of Ian Curtis’s life, which manages to take his story away from mythology really convincingly. You’re shown a young man trying to balance life in music and his illness with a domestic existence, and the performances of Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as his wife, Deborah, are very powerful. I wasn’t a huge Joy Division fan when they were around – I was studying nearby in Liverpool – but this film absolutely captures the mood of that time, as does the black-and-white cinematography. It also nails that struggle of being an artist and a human being. That isn’t captured enough."

"Well, I’m definitely a hopeless romantic and Titanic is one of my favorite movies. It basically came out when I was born, but my mom [showed me] Titanic when I was about — I want to say like eight, nine years old. It’s one of the movies I can never get tired of. I could watch it all the time. Actually, I had a really geeky moment: the make up artist that worked on this last film that I worked on — she had worked on Titanic, and I was like, “No way!” I freaked out and got to see a lot of behind-the-scenes pictures. I was totally fan-girling."

"The most visual of all world events was for so long reduced to television coverage. In Tokyo Olympiad, it was finally handled by an artist of the caliber the event deserved. With our one TV channel, the Olympics were a big deal in my house. For two weeks, bedtimes and TV time limits were thrown out the window, and we youngsters rejoiced. But what I saw then on NBC couldn’t prepare me for the radically elevated portrayal Kon Ichikawa achieves. His film offers the Olympic events as the compositional feasts they were, not just a score tally. (Also, the best movie ever to fold laundry to.)"

"The novel is set in three parts in the Ramsays' summer home, on the Isle of Skye. On the surface, Mrs. Ramsay — the devoted mother and matriarch of the family, and Lily Briscoe — a female artist committed to personal autonomy, stand in stark contrast of each other. Mrs Ramsay appears to have it all, but underneath, the responsibilities of being an ideal woman — a wife and mother — is slowly killing her. Throughout the first part of the book, Mrs. Ramsay is almost never without her knitting, a fact that becomes even more prominent in her absence, when the remaining characters return to the summer house after Mrs Ramsay’s death."