"I think that film is just one of the funniest movies ever made. The writing is impeccable. I don’t even think any other comedy has come close to being that smart and original and meaningful and funny. Bill Murray is just insanely good in that part and doing the same thing over and over again, but making every [scene] new. Tracking his progress in that film as he becomes a better person, it’s such detailed work. And we don’t often acknowledge comedy acting in awards or other things. I really think his performance in that is completely brilliant — everything about it. Even down to the stupid song that they sing on that little green in the center of the movie and the Sonny & Cher song that plays every time his alarm clock goes off. Every touch to it is clever and poignant. I genuinely think I’ve seen that film more than any other movie. That movie’s high on my list."

"In the book Mr Evans lays out practical ways to avoid genocide and the slaughter of innocents. Military intervention is only the very last resort and only if the benefits outweigh the likely negative effects of such an intervention. Rather, he focuses on the ‘toolboxes’ respected emissaries might bring to the table in dialogue with warring parties. A brilliant example is Kenya. When the church and homes were burnt in the Rift Valley and Kenya appeared to be moving towards uncontrollable violence, Kofi Annan and other respected leaders went to Kenya and were able to bring about the fragile peace that has held thus far. The ‘toolbox’ or sticks and carrots a dignitary might be authorised to bring to the table would depend on the country and its needs, whether it be loans or trade agreements or whatever. It is an excellent, practical and scholarly book which should be essential reading for all world leaders."

"PlayTime is an incredible film. I just love the idea of staging scenes that look familiar but don’t function as the scenes we imagined them to be. And I like that he was fascinated with the mundane. So there’s an airport setting and there are people wearing uniforms and people that look like passengers waiting, and there are scenes occurring, but it’s just the form of a scene that you have seen in some way many times. The way he mixed sounds, where the background noise was louder than the dialogue—having that buried in the background when people spoke is just really brilliant filmmaking. I love the recontextualization. And it’s a masterpiece, with long, huge, choreographed shots of all these entrances and exits and things happening in the background and foreground. So where you’re placing your attention has been subverted so you don’t quite know what you’re looking at or what to look at. And that is incredibly impressive and very inspirational."

"The best book I’ve ever received as a gift was actually the best gift I ever received from my mother, too. When I was young, she gave me “Letters: Summer 1926,” about the three-way correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak. Three brilliant minds that had never met, all writing sonnets and passionate letters to each other for four years, eventually falling in love with each other through this correspondence. Seeing this love triangle unfold through actual letters was very exciting for me as a young girl. Later in life, I met Susan Sontag, and she told me she wanted to give me a new edition of a book for which she had recently written the foreword. You can understand my surprise when I discovered it was this very same book. She was always giving me books over the course of our friendship, but this one is the most precious to me, especially since she is no longer with us"

"Being There is one of my favorite movies. It’s much more precise than a movie like The Last Detail. It’s a type of movie I hope one day to be able to attempt to make. It’s brilliant on every level. It is one of movies that I watch and go, “I probably will never be able to get close to this, but I should try.” The use of television in the movie is spectacular – how what’s happening on the television in the rooms that they’re in reflects or comments on the action. Nobody has ever done that better and people have tried since and always failed. Any time I see something on a TV in a TV show, I know that they’re thinking about how great they did it in Being There. It’s another movie with some of the best performances in comedy history – Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas, and Shirley MacLaine, so I go back to that a lot."