"A big, bold novel that spans six decades of the 20th century and opens with one of my favorite lines in literature: ""It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. Earthly Powers is like a big over packed old mansion you enter and never want to leave"

"And then kind of parallel to [Nothing but a Man] — number three would probably be my most favorite romance, Paris Blues. Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward. I love it. The dialogue in that film is some of the best I’ve ever seen. And Sidney Poitier, I think, gives one of his best performances. And it’s so, so sexy, that movie."

"I saw this at the Thalia, probably in the middle of winter. Heat was not its specialty. Richard Widmark manages to portray himself as twisted, conniving, pathological, sleazy, tragic, vulnerable, and handsome all at once in most of the movies I’ve seen him in, and never more exquisitely than in this, one of my favorite film noirs. Though I must confess, I’ve never seen Rollercoaster."

"Probably the most beautiful overall film/package combo in the Criterion Collection. Mizoguchi’s eerie, haunting, and elegant film is one of the most devastating morality plays I’ve ever seen, and it just might scare you into being a better person. It will most likely haunt you for quite a while. The design of the packaging is also really gorgeous. Most likely my favorite Criterion disc set."

"My favorite Fellini film, and the one that opened me up to foreign films and inspired me to look into the window of other cultures and artworks outside of my immediate influences. Anyone interested in the creative process, of any medium, should take in this film for its personal vision of the artist and the artist’s life, and where these intersect and divide. A masterpiece."

"Another one with a massive text resting on that second disc. How delightful it was to marvel in the splendor of this film and then watch the Godard–Fritz Lang special feature! Also, a truly beautiful cover of which I was always quite fond. This spot could just as easily be Masculin féminin, my favorite Godard for years. Criterion’s support of sixties Godard has always been remarkable."

"There’s always an Altman movie on the list. Currently I think it’s probably McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I love westerns; there are actually a lot of westerns I could add. A sort of deconstructed western. Altman’s one of my favorite directors and someone even whose lesser work I find really fascinating and had an intelligence about filmmaking and also about human behavior that’s kind of unmatched."

"Munro is a touchstone for me, and she’s been my favorite writer for more than 25 years. This is the first book I read by her, when I was a junior in high school. Right away, I found in her work something that was recognizable to me—and, at the same time, I found some fictional alchemy that even now remains beautiful and inspiringly elusive."

"How could so profoundly sensitive a writer of beautiful English have been such an apparently shallow, even unpleasant, man? Whatever the answer, I re-read Waugh’s books again and again, mesmerized by the chiseled craftsmanship of every sentence. I could have chosen any of his books, but the Sword of Honor trilogy, an affectionately comic portrayal of the bungling chaos of military life, is perhaps my favorite."

"I am just starting this magnificent new biography of Paracelsus. Ball, who is almost as much a polymath as his subject, brings out not only the extraordinary intellect and character of the man, but all the intellectual and social and political currents of the 16th century. Even before finishing it, I can tell that this book will take its place among my favorite half-dozen science biographies."