"My wife, Sofia, recently published her first book. I'm incredibly proud of her for all her hard work and dedication in writing this and don't know how she did this whilst being a great mom to our both daughters. The book is about her experiences being a young western woman living and doing business in a dictatorship, and it's a story of love and hustle in a land where nothing is what it appears to be."

"Andrzej Wajda’s films had an enormous influence on me as I began writing and directing. I had lunch with him at the National Film Theatre in London, after he had just made Everything for Sale, a film I loved. It was Wajda’s tribute to Zbigniew Cybulski, his friend and the star of Ashes and Diamonds, who died young. In Ashes, Cybulski plays a resistance fighter stranded by a sellout peace. His broodiness and manner seemed to mourn James Dean."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."

"I read a book called The Artist’s Way and it’s for any blocked artist. A year into making the album, I had all this incredible material. It was flowing but it stopped. Going to the studio was too much pressure. One thing the book talked about was, ‘Three pages a day.’ The first thing you do is write three pages freehand nonstop. That’s how I got back to writing. I got notebooks and notebooks full of lyrics."

"Niedecker lived most of her life in Blackhawk Island, a remote and marshy setting in Wisconsin, where she scrubbed hospital floors and cared for her deaf mother while writing some of the most quixotic, minimalist, moving poems of the 20th century. I know many by heart, like this one: “My friend tree / I sawed you down / but I must attend / an older friend / the sun,” but I still wouldn’t want to be without the hard copy."