"It’s a brilliant film about Mozart. If you don’t really know much about classical music, you hear the songs but you don’t think about the people behind them. This film turned that concept on its head, and turned him into this licentious part animal. The actor’s got this amazing high-pitched laugh that’s so funny.”"

"Nabokov’s essays on Russian literature are brilliantly funny and iconoclastic. He loves Gogol and hates Dostoyevsky and accuses him of being like the worst kind of sensationalist, journalistic hack. “Dostoyevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.”"

"The best of the Nathan Zuckerman novels, and that is saying something. The story rewinds several times, postmodern-style, and each retelling is a distinct, sometimes shocking alternative to the previous narratives, and yet the novel’s grip only tightens. Harrowing, funny, sexy, set in England and Israel, New York and New Jersey, altogether splendid."

"Until she writes another book of poetry, this collection, “Mercury,” for me is the apotheosis of Reines’s output and voice. You can read it like it’s a novel, turning pages until you get to the end, building a sense in your mind of the funny, gorgeous, odd, dirty, gnostic visions of one female gaze."

"Turgenev’s tenderness, this heartbreaking tale of two innocents crushed by the machinations of stupid, coarse characters, their inferiors in every way, is a masterpiece of evocation, both of the natural world, of a love extraordinary for its purity, alongside bitingly funny satiric characterization—all this create an atmosphere of sweet melancholy I find irresistible."

"I think Toy Story would be one of my favorites, the first one. A beautifully observed thing. Really, really strong characters. It was the definitive family comedy movie. A close second would be The Incredibles. Haven’t seen the second Incredibles, but the first one was great. Again, it’s just very good, funny characters, well done."