"Alice Munro always gets to the thing inside me that knows, with certainty, that this is my one life. There is a penetrating sense of ultimate aloneness in her writing. And in just a sentence she can turn from the present to the future and then all the way into the past, making the reader feel as if they are experiencing the sweep of life as moments accumulate, and then double back and reconsider. It presents at first as just a drip drip drip… and then before you know it, you’re standing in a waterfall."

"This novel was handed to me on a silver platter by my husband, who said, "You cannot die without reading this." I keep coming back to it because it's so detailed in recording the inner life of Dick Diver, the central character. His yearning — to save his mentally unstable wife, Nicole — just keeps unfolding. That aching is quite destructive but also so understandable. The word I think of with this story is "fragile." I was utterly struck by the fineness of Fitzgerald's writing and the timelessness of Dick and Nicole's failures."

"Talking Book blew me away when I was going through a dry period in my writing. I heard Stevie Wonder and thought that I couldn’t improve on what he’s done, he’s such a genius! I just fell in love with it, it was black soul music from that era, but sounds totally, totally now. One of things he developed was the protection of funk through the electronics of synthesiser, keyboard and singing. I think Sly had a lot to do with influencing Stevie at the time as well."

"I read Beloved when it came out in 1987, and it was one of the most difficult books I've ever encountered. The rhythm of the writing, the cadence — it was like learning a new language where you're just banging your head against a wall. Then, after several chapters, a door opens and you're in. To me, the book is all emotion, a big morass of feeling. It's remarkable. What this woman goes through, what she believes she has to do is so horrific — you can't help but think, "How does she survive?"

"This is fiction, but it impressed the hell out of me even though I very rarely have time to read fiction these days. It is the New York Times book review “Notable Book of The Year,” as well. It gives the account of Germans who fought Nazism and were killed or put in jail for life by Nazis for it. A German citizen is killed just for dropping cards all over the city writing his objection of Hitler’s policies. His wife was also sentenced to death, and was in jail indefinitely"