"And four… oh, this is tricky. I’m just trying to go through them in my head. It’s probably easier to pick 30 favorite movies as opposed to five. It might seem like an odd choice but I really loved it, the Tim Robbins movie Dead Man Walking. I just thought it was such beautiful, emotional, thoughtful filmmaking, and I’m surprised it hasn’t taken a bigger place in the western film canon."

"[Brackett] was my teacher. I imitated her, of course. She had those beautiful short stories in Planet Stories about John Stark, they were all Edgar Rice Burroughs par excellence. In other words, she could write better than Burroughs. She took the same sort of things he did: the fighting man of Mars, the gods of Mars, the Martian stories, but gave them that extra ambiance, style, and imagination."

"Reading this feels like going down a rapid, the way it flows. It’s so freed of expectations in a way that makes it very refreshing. It’s almost like jazz, full of nooks and crannies, sort of unpredictable but beautiful. There’s a fellow comedian, Jaqueline Novak, whose work I really like, and watching her perform a set I think, ‘Oh, she’s kind of the Clarice Lispector of the comedy scene.’"