"Mentally, Casablanca connects with my world. It’s very romantic, about giving and testing, and trusting and loving… And there’s the romantic music. Everything is [in line with] my tastes of romance. It’s also about an unfulfilled love, which makes everything more beautiful because you can’t have it. It’s just human nature. If you have it — you see the person, you see the romance — then the story becomes practical, like reality. But because it’s unfulfilled, it’s always a fantasy because we add so much of our own beauty, and romance, and poetry, into it. Also, Casablanca is about the sacrifice of giving love. Real love, I think, is unconditional; you give your love away to love somebody. Otherwise it’s not real love, it’s possessive, it’s ownership."

"Carver’s spare, minimalist style serves as a writer’s manual for how to get more out of less. In a sentence, or even just a phrase, Carver establishes the mood, the nature of his characters and their predicament. He gives us clues instead of paragraphs of description or lengthy dialogue. I often put people onto Carver, especially when they’ve shown me something they’ve written that needs drastic paring down. Now and then I’ve found it a good corrective when my own writing gets out of hand. My copy of this collection (thirty stories arranged chronologically by the date they were written) is well worn. Carver had something original to show the rest of us, and his early death is a real tragedy."

"Shawshank, I guess, because of the quiet nature of the movie, the development of it. I’ve heard that it’s a movie that didn’t really catch the multitude of fanfare for a while. People didn’t catch on immediately. I got it immediately. I got the story, the narrative, and who can’t listen to Morgan Freeman narrate a movie all day long? Also, Tim Robbins killed it. Our very own William Sadler, of course, who has brought to us Tony Teresi, in terms of [Joseph Sikora’s] Tommy’s father in Power. Sadler was great in it. Clancy Brown, who was in The Guardian with me and Kevin Costner, one of my first castmates. The Guardian was probably my second big movie. So, I love Shawshank."