"You've got to understand something about me and my career: I'm a romantic in life philosophy, in how I look at the world, the beauty of nature, of relationships. But I never got to do those roles. In my twenties, I wanted to be in a Splendor in the Grass."

"I could just as easily have picked Kagemusha. The beauty of the Samurai war film. Color-coded armor and banners and endless waves of soldiers attacking fortresses shrouded in mist. I read somewhere that Kurosawa painted the grass greener and the wheat fields yellower as part of his color scheme."

"Exactly what movies are meant to generate: fantasy, magic, beauty, and unapologetic escapism. The bizarre source material, stories from The Arabian Nights, gives costume designers Oliver Messel, John Armstrong, and Marcel Vertès license to unleash their prodigious imaginations. I collect the work of Vertès, who was also a prolific fashion illustrator."

"This is on here because we’ve got a live album coming out and we want people to hear it. Sold Gold is from our last album and we just want people to hear it and appreciate it in its beauty, so we took the opportunity to put it on this playlist."

"An 1849 story suite about a village on the coast of Maine. Its setting and characters are so vivid that I think of Dunnet Landing as a place I’ve been, where I’m very fond of the people. And the beauty of it is, I can go back there whenever I want."

"“Beauty,” Stendhal said, “is the promise of happiness.” James’s story pits the passion for superb objects against the operations of love and the laws of honor. In case you have not read it, I won’t be the spoiler and tell what happens to the beautiful things on the last page."

"“I hope to build a house with my films,” Fassbinder famously said. “Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.” For me, the front door to that house is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I first watched it when I was home from college one December, and my young and impressionable mind was instantly changed. The use of long takes, the meticulous, ever-moving camera direction, the outlandish costumes, the emotional cruelty, the wigs . . . Fassbinder finds beauty in despair, and despair in beauty, but ultimately knows that the real truth lies in the costume changes."