"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written."

"Oklahoma City was a test city for MTV, and this compilation of US and UK punk rock bands – XTC, the Cramps, the Dead Kennedys – came out around the time, and had that same spirit. One song each, blam-blam-blam. You didn’t know who was American and who was English and it didn’t matter – what did was every band was doing it themselves and looking bizarre. And in a world where you knew you could never be the Beatles, here was John Cooper Clarke performing to 50 people and being fantastic. That felt huge. Seeing the energy coming off the audience when he made that effort really did something to me."

"This novel is cited by many of my author friends as the best in the English language. I, too, am awed by its beauty and intelligence, so much so that I sometimes feel I should stop writing. (I won’t.) The narrator of this story has been bestowed with telepathic powers by virtue of the time of his birth. This proves useful in recounting his life, which is coincidentally wrapped around historical events in India. Rushdie injects much political criticism of the powers that came to be, and this trait in his writing recalls for me George Orwell’s treatise on why we write: politics has much to do with it."

"Herr, who recently passed away, was one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth-century. Reading Herr is immensely instructive and hopeful; he always makes me feel that, yes, the English language can be used to interrogate any dilemma, no matter how complex. Herr’s rich, high-culture/pop-culture language and his stunning level of erudition allow him to put all doubts and counterarguments into play and create a sturdy mosaic of ambiguity, with an affectionate but skeptical mind at the center of it. I wish he was still with us and writing about this moment – there’s no one I would trust more."

"My mother took me to see Jethro Tull for my 14th birthday. We were living in the Los Angeles area and they were playing a couple of towns over. It was pretty much my first rock concert. I was heavily into Jethro Tull back then and I still am. Stand Up is the record that moves me the most. It's only their second album and they're still kind of scruffy. There's a heavy rock influence but they had that English thing going on, you know, university dudes who were really into folk music. It didn't seem like an affectation to me – it still seems real."

"I read this book in high school when it was first published. It had the reputation of being “dirty.” It did not disappoint: I was all of 14. It was also deliciously funny. It still is. Its status is secure and I doubt there’s a “Best” list it’s not on. It’s wildly romantic, scathingly satiric of middle-class Americans as only a European aristocrat can see us, and ultimately deeply moving. Lolita is the light of everyone’s loins. Humbert Humbert’s despair is anyone’s who has loved and lost in vain. Nabokov “gets” America and Americans. He is one of the great writers in English and it wasn’t even his first language."