"I grew up with the Little House characters - I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder's books as a kid. Little House in the Big Woods is written for a younger child, and as you mature, the books do too. I was confused when my daughter did not like them at all. -- in Redbookmag.com I started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series when I was 8. The drama of the series was enhanced by the fact that I knew these were true stories – the hardships and pleasures of the pioneer life she described had actually happened to a little girl, and not only had she survived it, but she had grown up to write about it too. The most emotionally wrenching and enthralling of the series was “The Long Winter,” a depiction of the winter her family endured in 1880-81 while they were living in South Dakota. The winter blizzards lasted seven long months, during which the railroads stopped running to their town, and her family was trapped inside their house, subsisting on a very meager diet of potatoes and brown bread. I can still remember the passages where Ingalls described twisting hay into sticks all day for fuel for the fire, and her worry that they would finally run out of hay and they would freeze to death. It kind of made my pre-adolescent worries pale by comparison."

"According to Malka everybody who does this chooses Joni Mitchell, so I'm staying true to type. What can you say about Joni Mitchell? For me in my life she was the first female artist. You knew this was her art. You knew this was not something some bloke had cooked up for her. She wasn't "the singer"; this was her music. This was what she was putting across. I love the confessional aspect of it. I don't know if I can quote the words exactly, but it's something like I met someone down a dirt track road, he gave me something and took my camera to sell. It's about being in Greece or something like that. It's just all so matter of fact. People who screwed her over, people who she loved- and she just wore her heart on her sleeve. That's amazing, to do that. She's not hiding anything; she's just saying what's going on. There's a line "the times when you impress me the most are the times when you don't really try". As a spotty young man, to hear a woman say that was like, well maybe some girls might like me at some point, and maybe I don't need to try too hard because they'll like me for being me. It was a piece of information I needed to hear, I think."