"I love this woman’s writing. I’ve read everything, but this was the first. I finished it in the bath and cried my eyes out. It’s about grief, love, loss...all the big stuff. I went to a book reading of hers with the sole purpose of befriending her. It worked. We text!"

"It was love at first sight when I met this man in high school and despite his garbled language, we’ve been bedmates ever since. When I think of love, I’m Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, when of death, I’m Hamlet. Ariel and Caliban on my Tempest isle are pals I play with everyday."

"I love all of his stuff from A Love Supreme onwards. I love the whole spiritual nature of those tunes. Love Supreme was his hymn to god and it sounds like it. Whenever I hear that first track it makes me think of opening a window and all this fresh, clean spring air coming in. It's uplifting, in the tradition of gospel, but abstracted. All of his stuff from that point onwards was a hymn. It's constantly influential and inspiring."

"This is one of the first songs I can remember listening to over and over again as a little kid. I had ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Without You’ and they were my two favourite songs. I remember I would sit on the living room floor with my dad’s big headphones on, we had a massive CD player set and I would put it on and I’d just be… [gasps] I’d listen to it on repeat. “That was my first love of a pop ballad and I think those feelings were my first feelings of love in a way. I would just play it over and over and I think that was my first longing for wanting to create, but maybe not knowing that yet. Just being like ‘Oh my god, this is what I love.’ “It’s quite cool that it was Harry Nilsson, because I was just listening to what my parents were listening to at that time. I fucking love Harry Nilsson, he’s one of my favourite artists. Mariah Carey is a diva and she kills it, but it’s a different experience with the Mariah version. I love a diva and I love a good belt and an intense dramatic thing, but I like the more understated, simpler versions of things sometimes too. It’s like the Dolly Parton version of ‘I Will Always Love You’, there’s something so fucking beautiful and understated about that.”"