"I’m choosing Paranoid the single, not the album. Everything they did before that and the rest of the Paranoid album were really doomy. I liked the fact that Paranoid, the song, was singalong-able… if there’s such a word. I can’t explain why I liked it so much, it just stood out for me as a serious attempt at writing a great rock song that could be played on the radio."

"Version Control is perhaps the strangest fictional work of appropriated voices and subjects. It’s set in a surreal near future — or several near futures — as well as in several pasts. Though issues of race play virtually no role in the stories, one character, an African-American physicist, recalls dropping out of a writing course because the professor thought he should be mining his heritage instead of inventing science fiction."

"Another obvious choice, but I have so much love for DFW. I have always been more drawn to his non-fiction, and this collection of essays is my favorite. The first writing of his that I ever read was the title essay of this collection, and it made me want to be a better journalist. It think DFW is a writer that generally inspires other writers to want to be better."

"Fantastic cast, such smart writing, really quick-fire storytelling. Woody Allen is someone who doesn’t, I think, dumb down his pictures for an audience. He gives his audience credit, and I appreciate that. I enjoy that feeling that the director’s respecting me as an audience member; he’s not feeling as though I can’t potentially keep up with the pace that he’s setting or the story he’s laying down."

"The love triangle in this movie has probably been the biggest influence on my writing. Truffaut’s rivals aren’t out to destroy each other, they love each other as much as the woman they’re chasing, and this makes the conflict and complications all the more powerful. This film taught me that as a screenwriter you have to have compassion for all your characters, and that nothing is ever black and white."

"I always read this book again just to experience the delight of my first reading. I fell madly in love with everything in that book, the two main characters, Mary and Moses, and Africa not only described but conveyed through the writing. A true writer makes a continent come to life. I met Doris Lessing once in London while I was performing, in English, a Friedrich Schiller play."

"“In 1987, Thurston and I were both reading Philip K. Dick, whose writing has more in common with philosophy than science fiction, and whose descriptions of schizophrenia were better than those of any medical journal. Philip Dick had a twin sister who died shortly after she was born and whose memory plagued him his whole life—which is maybe how and why our new album ended up being called Sister."

"Not since The Empathy Exams has a book of essays stuck with me this way. I’ve known Chew-Bose for a decade and she’s always applied the same academic contemplation to her experiences, to her studies of human behavior, and to how it plays out in the films we know and love. She’s now writing profiles for places like Vanity Fair and she turns the genre on its head."

"Reading this novel is like going back to a life I didn't have, but one that feels eerily familiar, as a teenager in high school. There's such a force in her writing, which is the force of Novak—she looks like a sweet person on the outside, which she is, but inside she is a tornado of passion and strength enough to crush the planet with her pinky finger."