"“I like a good Brit gangster flick, so I like all of Guy Ritchie’s stuff. I like American gangster movies too, but for me, as an American, I feel like the British ones have an added quality to them. Because the culture is unfamiliar you get away from a lot of the clichés. They’re more gritty, less stylised.”"

"That was the first movie that I saw that I felt really painted the picture of the gritty hardcore realities of the urban drug culture. Done in a way that made it palatable for mainstream audiences. It was glossy and it was like that black version of an Italian mafia film. But I dug it for those reasons."

"Claudia Rankine’s book length poem Citizen was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in the categories of poetry and criticism. It is one of the most devastating takes on American culture I have read in a long time, laying bare the stakes of being black in a country long ambivalent about our presence here."

"Banks excelled in creating worlds so inventive that for any lesser author, they might have drowned the plot. This, the 7th in his Culture series, is set on an artificial planet made from nested concentric spheres, each lit by a tiny artificial sun. The story that plays out inside is as wonderfully complex as the world-building."

"Joseph Polisi is the President of the Juilliard School and one of the men I admire most. His beautiful book is a call to arms for all artists, and those who love the arts, to use their talents for the larger good of our culture, our communities, and our world. A must read for anyone in the arts."