"I’m not sure it was a present but it was certainly given to me, and it’s had a lasting impact on my writing life. It was Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. I was around 14, we were up on Cape Cod for a few weeks over the summer, and a librarian at this tiny library saw me rummaging through the paperback bin. She had seen what I had been reading and she reached in and took out the Greene. And then she said, ‘Keep it, if you like it.’ I still have it. It has a rubber band around the cover."

"This is definitely on my list of the greatest movies ever. I saw it in the theater and it was the first time I actually experienced hypnosis in cinema—a conscious hypnosis. It’s one of the mysteries of filmmaking for me—why does it work, and how does it work?—but to be honest I don’t want to look into it because I want it to stay a mystery. If I were running the Library of Congress I would make a 70 mm copy of this and put it in a nuclear shelter, just in case."