"When stories become iconic, you sometimes forget what made them so special in the first place. They can become the punch line to a joke. But A Tale of Two Cities not only has the best first line ever written—’It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’—it’s got everything! The novel has wine, guillotines, revolution! It has the storming of the Bastille! It has Madame Defarge, one of the best villains in any literary novel. At the end, it’s got a little romantic switcheroo: One man stands in the place of another and dies for the woman he loves. The first line is fitting right now. It’s a very have and have-not time. It’s certainly the most hopeful period for our country but also a very bleak one for a lot of people"

"It's not just an album to me; it's like a movie. It's a whole story—there's cruel, tragic storytelling. I listened to it for the first time in Berlin. Sometimes when I travel, I like to find things that relate to where I am. So I listened to this, and for the whole afternoon, I was like, Oh man. How am I going to leave the apartment? Something changed after I listened to this album. I love Lou Reed, because his voice sounds like your inner conscience. When I read a book, it's Lou Reed's voice narrating it. It's very intimate. I can't really listen to this album casually. It's like going to a museum and seeing a painting that really means something to you—a sacred moment. I don't have many albums that do that for me."

"This song is from one of the Éthiopiques compilations and I really got really into them a few years ago. I was touring around Southern France and Spain and I remember listening to that music for the first time and seeing the beautiful landscape out the window. There’s just so much emotion and feeling in his playing and it really made me want to have saxophone on the record. “It's interesting sometimes with instrumental music, how it can almost make you feel more than a good lyric will make you feel. It provokes something that touches you on an almost spiritual level. I think that's the goal as a musician - whether it's instrumental or it has lyrics, you're always trying to touch someone in a really deep way; you want to try to get at the core of somebody."

"Apparently someone is writing a 33 1/3 book about this 1981 album, which is universally regarded as Japan's masterpiece. It features electric guitar sounds previously possible only for Adrian Belew; the bass is so fretless it sounds like a moaning sea mammal, the gorgeous drums are so tonal they could be marimbas, the Prophet 5 synthesizer sits quietly in the mix making squiggly noises; and sometimes a violin plays, in a manner previously heard only in Chinese opera. The lyric and visual emphasis is on modern Chinese culture (like Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) without the spy-spoof parts) but not Chinoiserie – no pentatonic xylophones – and the implication that the future is Chinese is no more threatening than Kraftwerk implying the future is German. "We're young and strong in this party, building our visions of China." "

"Throughout my life, I’ve carried with me the image of a woman crying in the shower. At various times when I have experienced loss or grief, I think about that woman and find comfort in her image. Not because she is experiencing deep sadness but because I know how she feels, she knows how I feel, and that kind of recognition makes the feelings manageable enough, so they don’t swallow us up. It wasn’t until I rewatched The Big Chill after not seeing it for over twenty years—and after making my own film, The Intervention, which was inspired by the way The Big Chill made me feel—that I realized that the image in my mind was of Glenn Close in this movie. Sometimes a film can become a part of your DNA, and this one definitely has for me."

"I was up in Glasgow, Stephen Pastel gave me that record and it's since become one of my favourites because it's really nice to listen to lying down and relaxing. Sometimes that's what you want from a record, you just want to let it wash over you, and I find that one does it in a very pleasant way. Pulp and The Pastels were in similar dire financial straits because we were both signed to this terrible label called Fire Records. We both got screwed through that, but that wasn't what we bonded over. Stephen has an amazing record shop up in Glasgow called Monorail that's been going for a while. I remember him starting that back when everyone was saying 'well why would you open a record shop when that's a dead format', I think he was quite far-sighted there. "