"As Gil Scott-Heron said, “Home is where the hatred is.” . . . School is too. You need an escape. David Bradley’s performance as Billy Casper is incredible. There is something magical about the fringes of a town where it meets the country, where space opens out and a different kind of solitude becomes possible."

"Perhaps the best introduction to another great original of the English novel, who learned from Firbank's economy, but who had his own quite different imaginative world. Loving, set among the servants of an Irish country house, combines his superbly truthful ear for how people really speak with an unforgettable vein of surreal poetry."

"I read The Grapes Of Wrath on a tour when we were driving across the country with the whole band in the van, just jammed in with all the equipment. In that book, they’re all jammed into this horrible truck and people start getting sick and dying, and it was a very eerie feeling."

"I was never really much of an avid poetry reader, but for whatever reason Olds really connected with me. I remember reading these poems as a teenager and thinking, ‘Oh, she’s so fucking cool—this is a poem about the Pope’s penis.’ For someone in a very conservative Catholic country, that felt so punk."