"Tom Hanks remains one of my favorite actors. I remember seeing that movie at a very impressionable age. It was such a cool storyline, and Tom Hanks is a brilliant actor… and I always wanted to have an apartment with my own vending machine in it, after that. That was the coolest thing. And the trampoline."

"I’m not over this book. It’s so twisty and turny and exciting and scary and creepy and addicting. I’m a fan of interesting or unusual structure; this book, with its dual (and often conflicting) narrators, makes such excellent use of our own expectations of standard structure to keep the reader on their toes. Gillian Flynn is brilliant."

"Jonathan is one of my favorite authors, and this book is absolutely incredible…The book is about a brilliant 9 year old boy named Oskar who’s father died on September 11th. Oskar is an inventor with an incredible imagination who tries to find the lock that belongs to a mysterious key he finds in his father’s closet."

"My first big book to read introduced me to the brilliant insanity of a topsy-turvy world that shaped my imagination for life. I learned my brain was the best toy in the whole wide world! Reading is like Alice falling into a hole, where anything can happen. If you’re lucky you can get lost in the right direction."

"Reservoir Dogs, I love for the dialogue. I think it’s just unbelievably brilliant and funny. Original, and just strange — the little conversations between Joe and Michael Madsen when they’re in the office, and Chris Penn comes running in and he goes, “I see you sitting there, but I don’t believe it!” I just love every inch of that movie."

"There were a number of key films that taught me that great and startling cinema could come from outside Europe and away from Hollywood. I found Touki bouki (with its anarchic, vigorous style, brilliant colors and sounds, and charismatic heroine) completely surprising when I first saw it—and, more generally, it stands for the eye-opening cinema of Senegal."

"David Fincher, man — Fight Club, Se7en, those things. This was another film that when I watched it at the time I had to watch it again, to understand it almost. I was just entranced with it. The performances were fantastic — Helena Bonham Carter, Brad Pitt, Ed Norton. I just thought it was brilliant and shot beautifully."

"The Book of Ecclesiastes probably inspired the opening line of Beckett’s first published novel (“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”) Not Beckett’s most important work (whatever that means) or his most influential, but the one I love the most, maybe because he hadn’t yet perfected his art, maybe because it’s funny and sad and brilliant."

"How do you continue to write, to create beauty and aspire for freedom, under the darkest regimes? Akhmatova is brilliant—she is a fighter, a witness of her time, a thunder. The woman who makes me wish I could speak Russian. But reading her in translation is no less a treat for the mind and the soul."