"So I was in a crowded New York City cinema in 1997 watching Breaking the Waves in absolute awe as my girlfriend talked through the entire film, joked with her friends, and continually jumped up and down for cigarette breaks. I realized at that moment that I was dumping her. Thank you, Lars, for helping me see the light."

"My favorite essay in this collection is "Goodbye To All That." One quote has always resonated with me: "I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage." As a child, I lived all over the world — we moved a million zillion times — and I never felt completely happy until I was in New York City. Like Didion, I felt that I'd reached the mirage; I'd found a place where anything could happen. And she talks about that: "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."

"Last of the Mohicans was like my childhood favorite. I love that movie. The soundtrack to that is probably one of my favorite in the world. My favorite movie is probably the life of Daniel Day-Lewis. If you watched Gangs of New York, it sucked, but then you see him as Bill the Butcher, it’s unbelievable. You really want to say Gangs of New York because he’s so amazing, but then you want to say There Will Be Blood. I mean, really, he’s so amazing. My Left Foot, Last of the Mohicans; the guy is just a freak of nature. He’s like a national treasure. That’s what he should be considered. Mindblowing, absolutely mindblowing. I can’t wait to see him play Lincoln. Anything Daniel Day-Lewis is in, that’s pretty much my favorite movie."

"I didn’t even know when I saw it that Marisa Tomei had won an Academy Award for it, but it makes so much sense ’cause she’s amazing. It’s also my dad’s favorite movie, so I literally had a tape of it. But it wasn’t an official tape, it just kind of had a strip on it that said “My Cousin Vinny.” We would put it on, and me and my grandma and my dad would sit there and just be cracking up. And I really liked it because, you know, I’m from New York City, and you know, he kind of [embodies that]. It’s the perfect juxtaposition between someone from New York City that goes to the south and all the kind of lost-in-translation stuff that occurs."