"You got Richard Burton, and Clint Eastwood. I love it."

"I read a book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor recently, and how there was this crazy frenzy surrounding them."

"Take 19th century explorer Richard Francis Burton, resurrect him by a river on a strange world, naked. Add a Neanderthal, a Holocaust survivor and an alien, and a quest to discover what the hell this is all about, and you’ve not even scratched the surface of Farmer’s first Riverworld book."

"When I read the last page of this heartbreaking, funny, hopeful novel I went right back to the first page and read the whole book again! A beautiful movie star, a dreamy Italian man, a schlocky producer, an ambitious assistant, a rock star, a wannabe screenwriter, and Richard Burton all come together in the most winning way imaginable."

"Before Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy there was the bleaker, 1960s John le Carré, who wrote the novel upon which this film is based when the cold war was at its coolest. This meditation on spy-craft by Martin Ritt is Brit-noir at its finest. Richard Burton as the alcoholic Alec Leamas oozes arrogance and desperation in equal measure, and with wonderful performances by Claire Bloom and the always interesting Oskar Werner, this is a spy movie Bergman could have made. An unusual saxophone-driven score of terrific atmosphere—I once chased all over London to find it, returning home to find the album disappointingly did not feature the best cues."

"Back in the late '60s and early '70s, children's records were all the rage, with stars making cameo appearances. The Little Prince was no different. It featured Richard Burton in the role of the narrator in the audiobook. It had a who's who at the time as well, with big Hollywood names such as Jonathan Winters and a whole other bunch of people. The idea was that you'd read the book and along with it, you'd hear some sort of strange synthesiser. I got it for my birthday in 1974 when I was eight years old. It had one of those effects where the moment it was on the vocoder, I was paralysed, I stopped what I was doing - this I could vividly remember and I would sit down and listen. I literally started to pound tables to turn onto side two! The whole story is read out and the idea of a concept such as narration going over an orchestration or some sort of a continuous, linear soundtrack is something that stayed with me. It gave me the momentum to later on follow on with the idea of a concept record. Certainly a lot of our music has that fairy tale aspect to it and The Little Prince would have been one of the first influences - along with one or two others - that embedded in the DNA of Mercury Rev very early on. This is also probably my favourite book and after 40-45 years it still hits me. Try as I might to go in another direction sometimes, this musical aspect still comes out of me."