"I love this book because it is a haunting, touching, and beautifully written story about a deeply flawed family. I also love it because it was put into my hands more than 20 years ago by a young woman who said to me: ‘You must read this book.’ Did I ask that young woman to marry me because of McFarland’s book? That might be overstating things. But sometimes when someone changes your life by handing you a great book, she might be there to change your life in other ways as well."

"Psycho is a wonderful, elevated horror film, and it doesn’t necessarily have monsters or ghosts,” Simmons says. “You ever see Psycho? I’m embarrassed to say that there are people out there who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. Shame on them. It’s interesting to note Psycho had murders and all this kind of wacky stuff but you never saw a knife go into a body. You never saw a body actually bleed. I think that made it even more horrific. Sometimes the scariest things are what human beings are capable of.”

"I remember being very angry at their album title being Nevermind. I thought Nevermind? Have you lost your bollocks or something? I was drawing a line on it all, perhaps too sharply, but I have to say “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one of pop music’s all-time greatest. That song is firmly embedded in my psyche. So, I forgive them. Most bands can’t come up with one complete song, and sometimes one is enough. By “Heart-Shaped Box,” it was all starting to sound a bit suicidal. I felt it coming."

"That’s a film that, for me, that’s one that, even more than Annie Hall, is like an I-know-every-word kind of movie, you know, that I just can’t get over. It’s very comforting to me. It’s one of those comfort films. And it’s also really funny. And it’s one of those movies like… All the things about these romantic comedies and relationship movies or whatever, they don’t even make them like that any more, you know? Except for independent film. Independent film sometimes does, but you don’t really see them."

"Sometimes I think the greatest movie. Inexorable in its working out. Vittorio de Sica unbeatable as a WWII small time crook who goes along to get along and then finds himself having to be brave, not something he's ever wanted to be. The most horrific scene where a partisan is taken into a room to be tortured. Door shuts. Conversation goes on in a room outside, Nazi officer, collaborators, idle and casual, a few drinks, nothing heard from inside. Then the door opens. Has to be seen, this movie."

"Although any one of the recent godsend rush of Kurosawa releases could go in this slot. For years now this gem (and much of his filmography) has only been available for us poor Region 1 sods on crappy import discs, and though the broken English subtitles via a bad Chinese translation had a sometimes poetic dadaistic flair, it’s a relief to finally have a beautiful, intelligible disc of it. The film itself stands easily up to Stray Dog and High and Low as one of Kurosawa’s best contemporary crime dramas."

"This is another classic record that shaped a lot of what we did, I guess. You get those songs sometimes where you hear the sound of it and think something has happened here. Whether it's the glue or whatever that's given it this sound - and I get that with 'Crosseyed And Painless'. Whether it's loops or samples I don't know but it comes across like a soundscape with everything working off everything else. That one track does so much in terms of hearing how records can be made."

" I’m very lucky because I do it at the BBC, so there are no advertisements, and I’m allowed to choose all of the music myself and invite people in to interview them. For instance, there’s a group of girls called Stealing Sheep and I quite like their records, and there’s a label called Clay Pipe Music that releases really nice, short-run albums, often kind of pastoral sounds, sometimes electronic stuff. I can really just make the show two hours where I share stuff that I like with people. I love doing that."

"A powerful journey through despair and silence. A magnificent reflection on death and the meaning of life, as well as the ways life sometimes unveils its beauty—by, say, the taste of cherries that have fallen from a tree, a tree shaken by a man who was planning to hang himself on one of its branches but who remembered, when savoring these wild berries, that life is worth living. Long single takes, car scenes (for which Kiarostami is famous, and rightfully so). A gem. Must see. Now, please."

"Directors going independent to make precisely the film they want was not begun — as we sometimes think — by the latterday Johns (Cassavetes and Sayles). After World War Two John Ford formed an indie with the legendary producer (war hero also) Merian C. Cooper: Wagon Master was the lovely result, a film that seems like folk art. The stirring score and brilliant diagonals of Ford’s composition greatly inspired us in the Barcelona edit room — though I’m not sure if any trace of that influence could be found in our film."