"I was a John Peel listener like anyone who had any taste, any lonely soul - there were a lot of us and it was great when we all got together. He played this. I'd never heard anything like it. It was around that period after the Mexico Olympics and the Black Power protest and to this day, surely, this must be the first hip-hop record, not in terms of its music composition but in terms of the content. Everything is there. It is supreme. I wanted to know more about it, so I went out and bought some books - Soul On Ice, Seize The Time, all those things. That's really powerful. John was never quite as bumbling as he liked people to think."

"Firstly I’m going to go for The Virgin Spring. It’s a film that may surprise people but it really had an impact on me and I was just amazed by it. I saw it in a relatively short period of my life when I was teaching at college. When I was younger I hadn’t been allowed to watch any because I went to a Baptist College, but by this time I had put the religion behind me and that was one of the first art films I saw and I was very impressed by it. I mean, I could list you a dozen movies from that era by European by European film directors by Godard, Truffaut – Breathless, 400 Blows, all those wonderful European movies.”"

"Number one that always springs to mind is Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. I’m sure you’re familiar with that film. It’s one of those movies which manages to combine all sorts of flavors. People tend to think of it as a romantic comedy, but actually it has some quite dark elements; the Shirley MacLaine character tries to kill herself at one point. And that’s the sort of movie, I like to think — in terms of the sort of films I would like to try and make — are films which are hard to pigeonhole. It has elements of humor, maybe, but there’s also drama in there. Billy Wilder’s one of my heroes, because I think he’s able to sort of step between different genres and make masterpieces."

"Again, it's all about the outsider and making the ugly beautiful, which John Waters is very well placed to deal with. It's also about a very particular place, which is Baltimore, and about a particular pop culture moment: the early sixties, just before The Beatles hit, which is a forgotten time and much more interesting than everybody thinks. People often go with that Nik Cohn line that there's nothing interesting before The Beatles, which is absolute bullshit: I love all those songs like 'The Bug' and 'The Madison'. It's got Debbie Harry in it and it's got Divine of course, who's as wonderful as ever. What's not to like? It has a lot of charm and is fascinating on a number of levels."

"I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days. It’s from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? (singing) ‘I am the carpenter…"

"One of my favorite films has always been Tootsie. I think I fell in love with New York and the romantic idea of being an actor from that movie. I saw it in a theater when I was really young and I don’t think I understood it all, but I remember people laughing so hard and I just knew I was watching a great movie. And all that stuff between Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack is amazing. I revisit that movie a lot. I think, again it has that effect — it’s a very bittersweet movie, because it’s really funny but it also has those great sweet, honest moments. And it’s about a guy wearing a dress. I mean, it’s amazing that they pulled that movie off."