"I was driving through Iceland listening to this song and it’s just really gorgeous. I think this is how people feel when they take drugs - they begin on this floating cloud and then it becomes a bit chaotic at the end. “It sounds like they were on drugs when they made it, but it doesn’t make me sad when I think about it, there’s something with it, it’s positive without making me vomit, which I really enjoy. Sometimes happier music is hard to listen to, because you can question as to why you aren’t as happy as the people in the song, but I like this song. “I discovered this song much later, after ‘Rez’. When I hear one song I don’t automatically go and find the whole album, I kind of stop and just have fun with that song for months - I get really patient with songs and I can listen to them for months. I saw that ‘Born Slippy’ was on the same album as ‘Rez’ and now of course I have the whole album and I have rave parties for myself, just me. “I also love to listen to this song whilst I paint, when I paint something without meaning. I’m full of opposites or coherent contrasts, one day I like to be at rave parties and then I like to be in forests. I like to see what the world has to offer me.”"

"I first encountered that record when I was 16 and in college and a boy came round to my house. He was a boy who I really thought was so beautiful and I never thought that he'd even notice me, quite honestly. I had this tiny little box room in a shared house with a bunch of blokes, one of which never came out of his room - (at the same time that he never came out of his room, Tom Waits released that song 'What's He Building In There?' He never came out! I was just living next to that character and you would hear these strange bangs...) - and in that room I had a little single bed, and I'd brought my only other piece of furniture, my grandmother's huge wooden record player, with built-in speakers and the record player in the middle. This boy brought round a copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue, and I had never heard anything like it in my life before. We hung out all night and he played that over and over again. When he left in the morning, all my heart aflutter, he left that record with me and I was just enthralled by it, and I still am, to this day - I just never get bored of listening to it. Every time a song starts, it's like a really good old friend walking in a room. It's just always, always welcome."

"The first song that I think put me in a musical direction was probably Just Like a Woman by Bob Dylan, which I realise is not a very PC song now. I actually just had a think about how unacceptable that song would be in today’s day and age. But I think if you say something like that without any malice or highbrow nature then you could reverse it and say ‘just like a man’ as well. I definitely had a moment with it recently though where I was like, ‘I would not write that song today.’ But it was a revelation at the time: it was just a guy with a guitar and some lyrics and not even a good voice. That kind of hit me and I said, ‘I could do that.’ “This was probably during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and I was listening to stuff like Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana, but I wasn’t ever able to play like that, and growing up in suburban New Jersey I had no idea what Mr. Brownstone was. I was just pissed because I was in the suburbs and there was nothing to do. I was dealing with this whole lower middle-class frustration thing. Right after that, I heard the first Clash record and I made the connection between the harmonica that Joe Strummer was using with the harmonica that Bob Dylan was using."

"When I was young I always dug listening to live concerts. It was like we were there. I always think that live albums are a good way to represent a body of work anyway because it shows the songs as part of a collection better than, say, a greatest hits record. It wasn't so much that Cheap Trick At Budokan was live, it was more the selection of songs. Rick [Nielsen] was really an amazing showman as a guitar player as far as the tricks that he did were concerned. Plus, the power that he had despite being essentially a three-piece rhythm outfit was amazing. Then you had Tom [Petersson] with his twelve-string bass… Whoever thought someone would play something like that? I could have done without some of the squealing but having gone to Japan so much; I get it. That's their way of showing you that they loved you. I never really considered Cheap Trick to be a glam rock band. People forget that Rick used to have long hair before he transitioned to having short hair and wearing baseball caps when they supported KISS in 1977. Take a song like 'Hello There'. It has such a killer, punk rock attitude. It reminds me of Mötley Crüe doing a song like 'Live Wire': you don't expect that kind of aggression and when you hear it you think, ""Alright, you dudes can let it rip when you want to.""

"I heard a tremendous amount of first-class soul music... my father was in the Royal Air Force and I lived on a base. It just so happened that it coincided with the period of pirate radio stations, so a transistor radio was a virtually unmediated way of hearing absolutely incredibly music. I heard Hendrix, Electric Prunes, all the best soul music. You didn't know what these people looked like, who they were, anything. There was this guy Nicky who I used to play football with, his father was from Jamaica, and when he was moving on he gave the youth club his soul collection. The guy who ran the youth club, he was championing what I thought was starting to be second-rate output from The Beatles, because after 'Strawberry Fields' or 'Magical Mystery Tour' they came out with this Sgt Pepper's thing which I had issues with. Meanwhile, we had every good soul record. You also had Johnnie Walker, I think, on [Radio] Caroline. This also represents that period in the 70s when I was listening to Al Green, Sly, Stevie Wonder; the most interesting and radical music that was going. It's pathetic to go 'black soul music, oh right, Al Green's Greatest Hits', because the productions, the voice and everything is incredible. Let's just say one of the greatest singers, that's for sure, and he has to represent all of that."

"What can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said? Mike Nichols’s masterpiece precipitated the sixties youth movement in all its melancholic glory while also being a hilarious satire of contemporary consumer culture. My brother Jim has always been an early adopter of movie technology. The first Criterion release I ever remember seeing was the Graduate laserdisc in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen (we had seen the film previously only on a pan-and-scan VHS borrowed from our local library). It has one of the first commentary tracks I ever heard on a disc (maybe the first), by film scholar Howard Suber. I learned a lot about film analysis listening to that track in 1987. But the new Blu-ray also features one of Nichols’s many commentaries in conversation with the great Steven Soderbergh. They have done several together (Catch-22 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and they are never less than fully engaging and fascinating. When making my own film, I took to heart Nichols’s assertion that “a movie is about something, but it is also about something else.” And in this new transfer, The Graduate has never looked or sounded better. Robert Surtees’s brilliant compositions are a touchstone of modern cinema. Often imitated, never duplicated. By casting Dustin Hoffman, Nichols also flipped the idea of what a leading man was and could be, and changed the history of cinema."