"These four fantasy-fiction books by American author Evangeline Walton (The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon and The Island of The Mighty) are based on traditional Welsh myths. Someone sent them to me back in 1978 because I’d written a song called Rhiannon 5 years earlier. Walton started her work around 1934 and finished in 1974, which was right around the time that I wrote Rhiannon, so I felt like when her work ended, mine began."

"The brilliant teacher I had for a Shakespeare seminar at Yale (Joel Dorius) asked us one day if we had an idea of what heaven, for us, would consist of. What you’d hope it would be. His own answer: “Just to sit in a screening room, watching Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise projected repeatedly and endlessly throughout eternity.” Hard to argue with that when you see and resee this classic. Dorius’s version of heaven beats hell out of harps and angels."

"A sensation—nothing less. This novel not only won the Booker Prize in 1981 but was honored as the Booker of Bookers in 1993. I identify with Rushdie’s imaginary echelon of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, when India was liberated. In its rich tapestry of storytelling, magical realism, and history, the book revealed Rushdie’s staggering talent. He turns the turmoil of India and Pakistan into a Tolstoyan panorama that is much funnier than War and Peace."