"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 left Africa and childish things, and went to live in Paris, where Thérèse Raquin kept me on the straight and narrow. Read at an impressionable age, it’s a very important moral life lesson about guilt and consequences—without ever having to stick your finger into the pit of hell itself. At the time I was going to the American Library, and looking at the handsome boys who didn’t know I existed because I was a little chubby teenager. The descriptions of Therese sitting there with Laurent, playing dominoes in their house above the shop, and that burning desire for somebody rang very true for a little plump 14-year-old on the banks of the Seine."