"The autobiographical essays in this collection cover faith and family, booze, men, and self-love. They’re full of the small moments in Lamott’s life, the observations that make you laugh really hard and make you bawl really fast—two of my favorite activities. She talks about how the most popular prayers are ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I’ve read all her work, and she continually surprises me and speaks to me. One of the lines from this book that I love is: ‘All you can do is show up for someone in crisis. Your there-ness…can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding.’ That’s just killer."

"Carey is one of my favorite writers. The first book of his I ever read was a collection of short stories called The Fat Man In History. He also wrote Oscar And Lucinda — a beautiful story — which was turned into a film that I made. In Kelly Gang, the narrative voice is so unique. We Australians all know that outlaw Ned Kelly was hung after the famous shoot-out in 1880. But what Carey does is get inside his character's mind in such an illuminating and heartrending way. And there's not a trace of sentimentality in it. I so admire that as an actor, because I realize how difficult it is to do."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"This is one of my favorite science fiction films ever. It feels like everything in Solaris is transcendent and so deep. It’s hypnotic. It has so many sequences that are unique and unforgettable, like the part where the characters float in the library or when the wife comes back to life and then breaks apart as if she were made of glass. And there’s the idea of this spaceship floating on top of a strange ocean that seems to have some form of consciousness. All of those ideas are so strange and beautiful. It’s remarkable that Tarkovsky was able to make a film this spiritual in the Communist era. I don’t know how he did it."

"I went to see The Spirit of the Beehive at Film Forum on a whim only a few years ago, when it was rereleased, and it immediately became one of my favorite movies ever. It opens with a town full of kids, all yelling “The movie’s here! The movie’s here!” while running alongside a truck carrying a print of Frankenstein to the church where it will be screened. From there, you are swept right into the life and story of a thoroughly compelling little girl with beautiful brown eyes, a sister, a cat, a big house, a fair dose of anxiety, and a lot of free time in stressful post-civil-war Spain."

"One of my favorite films is the movie Tootsie. I really love Tootsie. I just watched it when I was a kid and for some reason, I just, I’m obsessed with that movie. I think I’ve watched it 100 times. It’s just so funny and fun, and I love it. It’s cool. I like that it’s sort of about women, you know? It’s sort of about how he finds the woman inside himself, so there’s sort of like this feminine aspect to it, and I just love Dustin Hoffman. He’s amazing. I don’t know, I just love that movie. It’s emotionally totally satisfying to me, and it sort of makes me feel good while being interesting and smart."

"Possibly my favorite of the many Cassavetes films I love. Why? Maybe because he found a way to depict the ruthlessness of the Hollywood system, and because of how Cosmo (Ben Gazzara) keeps smiling as he searches for a civil way out of his predicament. It’s very roughly made, which I find touching and refreshing, now that we all seem to fetishize high production values above all else. The cabaret scenes are authentically seedy, even a little pathetic, and are set in an LA that no longer exists. But there’s real tenderness between Cosmo and his black girlfriend and her mother. The story seems to meander in an alive, curious way, even as it drives to its terrible conclusion."

"Another favorite of mine was actually filmed during World War II—Brief Encounter. This one deals with love. And of course there are many kinds of love. One, I suppose, the best kind, I think, is to find someone to love who reciprocates your love. I'm really the marrying kind. And I love being married to Cindy, who, incidentally, happens to be a very fine filmmaker. But another kind of love is to love hopelessly, to love someone you can never have, the awful sweetness of longing for the unattainable, that strange and blissful frustration. Brief Encounter, so gorgeously acted, so lovingly directed, is the finest film ever depicting that kind of love. Both heartbreaking and romantic."

"I’m a very bad TV watcher, meaning I rarely watch more than one episode of any given show, and I usually don’t even make it that far. I downloaded all the episodes of this to watch on a flight and had I not been stuck on a plane and forced into finishing the series, I likely would’ve missed out on one of my favorite viewing experiences this year. The moment in the elevator when the two leads first meet overwhelmed me to the point of tears. It so perfectly summed up that feeling of realization you have when you meet your soul mate, romantic or otherwise: “I’m not alone in the world.”"