"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."

"The first movie that comes to my mind when somebody asks me about favorites is Searching for Bobby Fischer by Steve Zaillian. First of all, it’s a beautifully, beautifully shot and acted movie. I mean, the screenplay is brilliant, but more than anything, Conrad Hall shot the movie, and it’s one of the best performances I’ve seen by an actor of any age in a movie. The honesty and the presence of the lead kid in the movie is amazing. And every actor surrounding him is extraordinary, from Joan Allen, and Laurence Fishburne, Joe Mantegna, Ben Kingsley; Laura Linney plays like a one scene role in the movie. Like a virtually unknown at the time, Laura Linney. And just the story of father and son and the score is beautiful. It is inevitably one that I am always drawn to, and I think it’s filled with hope but also like a real darkness and the beauty of childhood."