"I’m a huge fan of U2. I saw them six times last summer. My boyfriend’s like ‘We get it, they’re almost 60, relax.’ The band gives an oral history of their entire career like they’ve never done before. I’m always intrigued by books in which people retrace their steps — this thing didn’t work out and this thing didn’t work out, then this thing sorta did, then we lost our momentum… but it really was cool to see their creative process from before they started as a band in high school. Hopefully I can do even one tenth of the things they do to inspire people. It’s long, so you’ll have to buckle up for a bit. But it’s definitely worth it."

"I went to see Walter Lure [Heartbreakers guitarist] play L.A.M.F. a couple of weeks ago. I went to this by myself in downtown LA. There's five dollar parking across the street, and I parked my car. I went in and saw Pirate Love, Born To Lose, Chinese Rocks. That's all I needed. It was great. This record made a huge impact on me. Johnny Thunders' playing and Jonsey's [Sex Pistols' Steve Jones] playing: I've played guitar ever since, and that's who I fashion my guitar playing after. I got to play in a band with Steve in the 90s [Neurotic Outsiders], and it was like a dream come true. I started playing guitar and he immediately recognised where I got all my riffs from!"

"We can throw in Fantastic Planet, La planète sauvage. We can throw that in there. The cut-out animation style, the psychedelia of it. I think it’s such a hypnotic piece of work, and I loved it ever since I heard the samples of the movie. I heard the samples before I saw anything. Madlib sampled that s—. I was like, “What is this animated movie?” So I credit him for me hearing about this, and I have just been on it ever since. I own some of the original cut-outs of the movie that they did. I buy some weird little pieces of art sometimes, but that is one of my prized possessions right there. You know, bits of little movie history."

"It [was] unlike almost anything else before it. I think so often movies try to do too much, especially when you try to adapt a big, sprawling novel into a film, and you try to compress hundreds of years or generations. It can work, certainly, if you’re Kurosawa or David Lean or somebody. But a lot of times, the best movies are not novels, they’re poems. That movie is just this beautiful tone poem. I don’t know how many pages of a script that is. It’s probably a very short script, but she used the medium so well. And when we saw that, we thought, “Wow.” We kept thinking about that movie, too, when we were writing, although we ended up writing something much more verbose."

"My last one probably seems… it’s really true though: Friday Night Lights [laughs] is one of my favorite movies. And I only say it like that because I… look, I love it. Maybe it’s my love of football playing into it as well. I read the book before I saw the movie. The book is great. I was really into it and I thought, there’s no way the movie is gonna be as good as the book and, I don’t know — [director] Pete Berg did it for me. I’m a huge fan. Maybe it’s all those boys. I don’t really know what it is. Any time that movie’s on TV, I gotta watch it. It’s weird, I know; but you know, that’s me."