"Being a military historian, I was really blown away by the depiction that [Stanley] Kubrick had of trench life. But more importantly, I was immersed in the moral quagmire that Col. Dax, played by Kirk Douglass, experienced in the film. There’s a moment when somebody looks down at a cockroach and says, “You see that cockroach?” He says something like, “In an hour, he’ll have more relevance than I do.” And [another character] steps on the cockroach and says, “Not anymore.” Also, it was a very revolutionary shooting style that Kubrick presented, with his long tracking shots and his use of close-up wide lenses that I found very attractive. I first saw that film when I was a cadet at West Point."

"Sirk is actually a new filmmaker for me. I’ve been waiting to see one of his movies again in a theater—I sometimes do that when I feel like a filmmaker is going to be really important for me. I saw Imitation of Life for the first time two years ago, and it really blew my mind. Then I saw a print of All That Heaven Allows last year in Berlin. I’m very curious how Sirk’s films played when he was alive and what was talked about when they premiered, because they seem so revolutionary to me in many ways–the social issues, especially. And obviously the colors in his movies are huge. I don’t know enough about Sirk, but I want to."

"This book is a house with multiple doors, endless corridors and windows into eternity. No two readings of The Arcades Project can ever be identical. After you finish it, the way you perceive the city you live in won’t be the same again. Streets and arcades, modernity with its illusions and promises, all told through the eyes and wanderings of a flaneur…. It is an unfinished project, but then again, perhaps a book of this magnitude could never have a definite end. Benjamin is an extraordinary thinker, a lonely rebel, an odd revolutionary that doesn’t quite fit into any tribe, a man of immense intellect and hopeful despair, and in the words of Hannah Arendt, a failed mystic. I love all of that about him."