"It’s so corny, but it was the first film I saw and the thing about the mother hit me really badly. I remember it was a good connection with my sister, who was fifteen years older. I was about 5 or 6.”"

"In my formative years I was completely taken by this combination of low life, stage pantomime and romantic twizzle. Jean-Louis Barrault, Etienne Decroux, Arletty and Pierre Brasseur on the boulevard of crime. Now, in my dotage, I like it more than ever."

"One of the most talked about books of the last couple of years, and for good reason. Both sobering and conservatively optimistic in equal measure, it seems even more relevant for us at the moment to learn from our socio-anthropological history."

"A stunning, heartbreaking, cinema verite sprint through Beirut in the spirit of “400 Blows,” capturing loss, love, resistance and the determination to live — with one of the youngest, most charismatic finds in years, Zain al Rafeea, who plays a boy named Zain."

"When I was 9 years old, I went to a book fair behind a church in rural New Hampshire. I was allowed to pick out two books. I really wanted the Gary Larson cartoons (the stuff that guy does with woodland creatures!)."

"Miller is the writer who gave me the initial stimulus to write. When I read Miller, I said to myself, ‘Okay, this is literature.’ He was a rebellious writer whose books were censored for years, and that in itself was meaningful for me."