"I discovered this book by the poet Adreienne Rich in the now long gone Feminist Book Store in NY's Greenwich Village when I was 25 years old. The title called out to me and became the basis for how I formed my relationship to my own authenticity and how I have approached relationships with other people for my entire life."

"W. C. Fields doesn’t get credit for antiestablishment chaos the way the Marx Brothers do, but his nonsensical visions of getting rich quick deserve no less notice. This movie would still make my list if it only consisted of the sequence in which the con man J. Frothingham Waterbury’s junk bond pitch turns gleefully absurdist when recounted by Fields’s Egbert Sousé."

"In the last ten years this magnum opus has eclipsed Ulysses as the most influential novel of the 20th century. Proust is wonderfully companionable, his analyses of passion and snobbism and the corroding effect of time are devastating, but despite his philosophical gloom his rich, intelligent prose is exhilarating. He and George Eliot are the most intelligent of all authors."