"This thing hasn’t died. I saw it not long ago, probably four or five months ago. And it was fresh and not dated, and the acting isn’t dated either. The whole thing has lasted all these years, and it’s still fresh."

"This film actually frightens me, and that’s saying something for a documentary made some thirty years ago. The Maysles brothers and their team crafted a glimpse into the dark and dysfunctional world of the American family and a failing American dream."

"There was a movie Kirk Douglas did that I loved a lot, Lonely Are the Brave. You’ll have to look that one up. I actually met him about 14 years ago, and he actually said that was his favorite movie."

"I had a similar experience with the Garcia Marquez novel A Hundred Years of Solitude. In miraculous Macondo, the ordinary and supernatural are entwined; incest and intermarriage give many generations of the Buendia family a classically Greek and predestined future."

"I got this book a couple years ago and since then two people have bought it for me — and they are right to! The very specific, imperfect femininity — the sense of one woman’s struggle to make art — that’s my bailiwick."

"A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes"