"“I’m not typically interested in poetry, but I discovered The Flowers of Evil in high school as I was just becoming a goth and getting into Trent Reznor – and everyone else was getting into the Beat poets, who I find comparably boring if we’re going to discuss druggy, surrealist poetry. This work is so visceral, filthy and gorgeously written. It feels like a distillation of the opium scenes from Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, but more abstract and extensively documented. This one poem is just a disgusting, sexual description of a corpse that is permanently burned into my mind.”"

"Hugo Santiago was obsessed with the flowers of the jacaranda trees that he remembered from the streets of his dear Buenos Aires. Hugo had shown me an Edward Hopper painting I had seen before without ever noticing its compositional mystery: a monochromatic tendency disrupted by a hint of a new color. There’s a curious red square that makes the chimney on top of the house stand as a key to unlock a private mystery. For the mise-en-scène of what ended up being his last film, Hugo chose the jacaranda’s hue: purple. For my new film, Isabella, I chose purple in his honor."

"It's kinda old hat now, I guess, to have a paper dictionary, but I loved our dictionary so much-flicking through a book WITH ALL THE WORDS IN was like having a book with a million Christmases in. I kept a list of my most precious words on my wall, like trophies, or pressed flowers, or phone-numbers of hot boys: "Jaguary, mimosa, cathedral, lilac, shagreen, ardent, isosceles, attar of roses, uxurious, leopardskin, jubilee, zoo." Every dictionary contains every word, and therefore every book-just not yet in the right order. Just like every person has a book inside them, too-just not yet in the right order. We are all dictionaries."