"The whole range of arguments in that book is quite radical and complex and beautiful. It’s the first book I’ve read by an author, masculine or feminine, that has a defiance of the situation, which is deeply subversive in the holy sense – it’s other-worldly. She says that this world is stained by human misconception, that men and women have wrong ideas – even if they are ten million years old and come from the mouth of god, they are still wrong! The position in that book is so defiant and passionate that she creates another reality and just might be able to manifest it. It’s from that kind of appetite, with the way things are that new worlds arise, so I have deep admiration for Andrea Dworkin."

"Not actually a “spiritual” work at all (if only someone could define terms like that for me), this is the first truly great film about institutional oppression (forget the Soviets’ chockablock puppeteering and jigsaw manipulations), a subject that always manages to give a film with this much passionate force pertinence in virtually any age and political climate. It took me years to realize—and this is all the props George Lucas will get from me at this late date—that Dreyer’s film is in fact an abstracted dystopian horror film, a point Lucas made by remaking it as THX 1138, right down to the shaved skulls, white-on-white compositions, inarticulate victim protagonist, looming totalitarian machinations, and semihopeless action finale."

"If David Thewlis in Naked is my favorite male performance, then Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that. I’ve always felt that the first films he made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances. But when he moved over to France with Code Unknown and then The Piano Teacher, something happened where he started making very passionate filmmaking. The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality."

"As in the Max Ophuls film, Lean also deals with romantic love outside of marriage and intelligently understands that these relationships were sad and not meant to be. But with the end of marriage as anything more than a foolish, outdated formality that no one takes seriously anymore, the romantic film has logically disappeared, and there have been no great romantic leading roles for women ever since. The vulnerable, sympathetic character Katharine Hepburn so beautifully plays would be now considered some kind of neurotic nutcase, but I think it’s her best performance and it’s David Lean’s best film. He specialized in this genre of marital infidelity in films such as Brief Encounter and Passionate Friends, and when he gave it up for his outdoor spectacles, I don’t think he was ever as good again."