"It was love at first sight when I met this man in high school and despite his garbled language, we’ve been bedmates ever since. When I think of love, I’m Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, when of death, I’m Hamlet. Ariel and Caliban on my Tempest isle are pals I play with everyday."

"A friend of mine turned me on to O’Connor in high school, and I’ve been reading her ever since, constantly amazed at her bold vision and wicked sense of humor. She’s one of the few writers I know who make religion seem like a radical challenge, rather than a source of comfort."

"A film that seems to get more important every year, and I don’t mean that facetiously. I don’t think it’s actually possible to make a flick about high school in the 1970s that surpasses Linklater’s. He did it. It’s done. We all got served. The characters have perfect names too: Pink, Mitch, O’Banion, etc."

"There’s a whole wave of Latin American fiction that I didn’t encounter until later in life. In high school one reads grand narratives like Don Quixote, and Garcia Marquez was the closest to contemporary we got. This felt like watching the movie Ghost World; there’s something very exciting and fun about the quotidian in it."

"We always recommend it to our students. We both teach high school classes a lot, and most of them aren’t aware of this movie, even though it’s the most honest and accurate depiction of that age. I guess they’re early high school or middle school, they’re about fourteen or fifteen. There’s almost a documentary feel to it. At the time, the [kids] weren’t professional actors, though a lot of them have gone on to acting. [Director] Peter Sollett did such a beautiful job. It’s so loose and warm and real and naturalistic and funny and unexpected. So much of it wasn’t rehearsed, and they let a lot of that process unfold while they made the movie. The kids sort of do their own dialogue. But I remember seeing it and thinking, “I’ve never seen it done that well before.” Usually I think teenagers are overwritten, written by much older people. Sort of reinventing."