"We were living together when she made this record. She was my girlfriend of eight years. She doesn’t get enough attention for what she does so I definitely had to throw her in here, lest the world forget. I mean she’s touring right now with Nite Jewel, so hopefully she’ll make it to the UK. I’ve got too many artists that I like for too many exceptional reasons."

"A Czech artist arrives in New York in the late 1930s and joins his cousin, a Brooklyn-born writer, and together they create comics. The world of comic books at that time was exploding, with the arrival of Superman in 1937. It would be criminal to try and explain these adventures, but Chabon is a truly great writer and fortunately he gets to do that in this book."

"It was just the oddest time of my life. We were in Texas in some godforsaken little city, little town. We never stopped using the accent no matter what we said. We were just wrapped up in it. Ellen Burstyn and I would hang out together. We’d talk about our horrible situations, relationships, our marriages. We were both going through divorce. We never stopped talking in the accent."

"It has all the elements you’d expect from a Sherlock Holmes story—you’re presented with a number of things that would help you solve the question, but you can’t or you don’t. When you get to the end and Sherlock explains everything, you say, ‘Aw, I should have noticed that!’ All the facts are there. It’s hard to piece things together without the background and the inquisitive mind Holmes has."