"One summer, they were doing a ’70s movie revival at the Film Forum in New York, and Soter and I would go see double features; you pay for one, you see two. All ’70s movies. It was great, so we’d go there all the time. One of my favorites was John Cassavetes‘ Husbands. That was a great, funny movie; first of all, it was cool because a lot of it was improvised. There’s Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes…one of their buddies dies, so they basically decide life’s too short and they’re going to go get drunk one night and reflect on life. So it’s one night of these guys going out and drinking, but then they end up going to London."

"I have never tired of watching this film over the decades, ever since it premiered on TV in 1955, the same day of its theatrical release. Richard III is the greatest character the world’s greatest writer ever created, and this is his best play, and the greatest heroic performance ever given by the greatest English-speaking actor, Laurence Olivier, perfectly directed by the actor with a superb supporting cast and a fantastic score by Sir William Walton. It’s quite an achievement in every possible way. From his first appearance in the part on the London stage in 1944, it was acknowledged as the greatest Shakespearean performance anyone had ever seen, and it seems destined to remain that, thanks to this great film"

"The Deer Hunter’s something I saw when I was very young. I saw a lot of disturbing movies when I was young. Alien, American Werewolf in London. There were a lot of movies that probably kids shouldn’t go to. And it just blew the top of my hair off, you know? The Russian roulette scene. Kind of like the chainsaw scene in Scarface was just really dynamic cinema, you know? Raiders of the Lost Ark is another one. Jaws. You get me going, I can’t stop. But those scenes, they stick in your mind and, yeah, it changed you. I think they kind of change you. Maybe Deer Hunter changed me. It was about friendship. It was about war, but it was also about friendship."

"There are three movies the witnessings of which have been the most traumatic in my moviegoing times. Viridiana was one, seen in a London cinema, maybe up between Hampstead and Highgate Tubes, in 1990 or so. Another was Straw Dogs (also available as a Criterion release). The third was The Elephant Man, one of the few movies to which I remember my mother taking me. A commonality in all three (the commonality from which I recoiled) is the cruelty of the mob, which remains one of my biggest fears. I put these two movies in this list because I can’t help but value what they did to me, what they allowed me to comprehend about my relationship to the crowd."

"I’d gone to college because it seemed the group wasn’t going to do anything. But as I left college in ’91, it felt like we were allowed to have fun again. Bands like Stereolab and Suede had started, and we played some concerts with them and got to meet some of the bands that were around in London at that time. By ’93, it was all turning into something interesting—I don’t think they’d come up with that horrible word “Britpop” yet, but there was a new movement of bands. It was before it really broke and got spoiled by getting too commercialized. It still was really just a bunch of people in secondhand clothes getting wasted in Camden, which was fun."

"It’s almost like these three sisters are a part of my family... I grew up in Sweden (New York, too, and by the time I read this book, was making my own life in London in my late teens). The world around me was not exactly celebrating cultural diversity... this book, and books like “The Color Purple,” “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and “Beloved,” took me by the hand, held me, beckoned me into womanhood, aroused a love of my heritage, and love for myself. I ate this book in one serving. It was passed down my by mother... again, I’ve given it to my daughters and waited, impatiently, to talk to them about it as they’ve read."