"My favorite part of this novel is how the main character is so fixated on re-creating a very specific scene from his past, and he's not even sure why. It's an act of theater, and memory, and something powerfully unconscious — and we are witness to the process. He is a kind of inverted Proust, making the madeleine from scratch to evoke the thing you didn't know needed evoking."

"This just happened to be the one of Green’s novels that floated to the Favorite position in my mind today, but they rotate. Really, in my opinion, these peerlessly eccentric, comparatively short marvels, which are so bafflingly different from each other as well as from everything else, should be considered parts of a whole. Loving is the most visual of them, but each has its own extraordinary qualities."

"And four… oh, this is tricky. I’m just trying to go through them in my head. It’s probably easier to pick 30 favorite movies as opposed to five. It might seem like an odd choice but I really loved it, the Tim Robbins movie Dead Man Walking. I just thought it was such beautiful, emotional, thoughtful filmmaking, and I’m surprised it hasn’t taken a bigger place in the western film canon."

"Coming up to more recent years, I think Meet Joe Black, again, was a tear-jerky chick flick for me that I loved. And the performances…Anthony Hopkins can do no wrong, Brad Pitt‘s become a favorite as well, and Claire Forlani — stop already! All that girl has to do is blink and I’m enraptured. And that was another romance with a sci-fi twist; death coming to take a holiday."

"Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist, which is my favorite book, he talks about the whole of the universe, and it's contained in one grain of sand. For years I've been saying that, and now it's really starting to expose itself to me. My own grain of sand has been story. The next 10 years will be my peak of innovation in filmmaking and just as a human being."

"Then, my next favorite film is Gary Cooper’s High Noon. Here we’re talking about the one man against many, having to stand alone. And what sticks with me about that movie is that the woman that he loved, who was completely anti-violence, stood up with him, ultimately; and at the end, when all the townspeople had run away, he took that badge off and threw it in the dirt."