"I'm engaged to this brilliant author, so this would be the book I'd probably strap across my heart. It might keep my heart intact somehow, although, ironically, it's a heartbreaking bakers dozen of linked short stories about a young seeker on the sprawl, reeling from a recent break up and the loss of his brother."

"On my eighth birthday my mother gave me a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The inscription read: ‘Here is the brother you said you wanted.’ I was having trouble in school—particularly reading—and a psychologist had recently tested me and informed my mother and the school that I was, in the parlance of the day, ‘retarded.’ My mother steadfastly refused to accept this, saying, ‘You just haven’t found anything you care enough about to read.’ It turned out I was dyslexic and perhaps mildly autistic. It took me months, and when I was done, I could read, and I had indeed been given a brother—two, in fact, and I have visited with them every year since my eighth birthday."

"I love that it’s an art film about teenagers. I just love the way that it’s shot — I love those old lenses, those Zeiss lenses; they have a softer feel. [Coppola and her DP, Harris Savvides, used the lenses from Rumble Fish to shoot Somewhere.] Roman [Coppola, her brother] and I are just sentimental about film."

"I’ve read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel. It’s hard to select just one of Wolfe’s books, but his story of a man who leaves his North Carolina town to seek a better life was probably the most important to me."

"Wilco is the best modern band out there. The first album I heard was Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and that just sort of blew my mind. Me and my brother like to think that we’re sort of in the same vein as Wilco, music-wise. I just think Wilco is the most inventive, amazing band of our generation."