"Until age eroded memory, I could recite “Sailing to Byzantium” at any hour in any pub in the world. When I first went to Ireland in the 1950s, I toured all the sacred sites as pilgrim: Sligo, Innisfree, Drumcliff, Ben Bulben, Galway, Thor Ballylee, Coole Park. I get goose bumps still just by saying the names."

"Jason and the Argonauts is the very first movie that I ever remember watching. My parents were living in New York and I was a very young kid. And I remember being in front of my TV all alone watching skeletons fighting with swords. For me it was magic. I guess the emotion was so strong that the memory of the room and the TV still piques my mind because maybe at that age you don’t really know what a skeleton is. But watching skeletons fighting was like, “Wooh-wooh, what the f— is this?” And I have a memory of that movie that sticks in my mind of the giant — there’s a boat that goes through the legs of a big giant. I have a lot of respect for those movies, like the old King Kong, which create a grand world with the tricks. I’ve always been respectful to all the people who do visual effects and special effects, because making movies is also making magic. You can also admire a man who pretends to cut a woman to pieces in a theater because he makes these images of horror that, again, don’t hurt. That was my very first memory of this film. And I was always going to see movies since then."

"Lyrically, this was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn. It had vocally high choral moments, and then rapid-fire dialogue. I used very small physical gestures to help trigger my memory: There’s a moment — “Thank you for the 27 dinner plates and 37 butter knives” — and I just literally, with the word “knife,” thought of something stabbing me in the stomach."

"This is a book that brought me to my knees in gratitude. So much ancient wisdom that I had assumed lost is to be found here. For those of us of African descent—and who among us is not?—it will generate a gentle healing in just those areas of community, ritual and memory where we’ve felt so orphaned and bereft."

"Reading Proust is not like reading any other book: it is like having another life alongside one’s ordinary one. I read it every day for ten years. The miracle and mystery of consciousness, the tricks that memory plays, the gifts and thefts of time, the exhausting and exhilarating never completed task of perception: no one has come so close in capturing these"