"Dumbo is my favorite movie of all time. A remarkable motion picture. Just over 60 minutes, it’s so tight in terms of storytelling. It’s like [snaps fingers]. When you have kids and you watch Dumbo, it really nails you because there’s that “Baby Mine” sequence. I like [Dumbo] because it’s the most cartoony of Disney features. I like it because the main character doesn’t talk. Such a wonderful film. It is very funny. Great music. It also really moves you. It has a really huge heart. Walt Disney always said that for every laugh, there should be a tear. I live by that."

"There’s just so much on this: It’s a double album and by the time you finish it—if you can finish it—you can’t remember what you heard at the beginning. I liked that,” he said of Beefheart. “It was anti-music in the most interesting and insane way, like kids learning to play violin—which I was going through at the time. So all the bum notes I was being told off for by the teachers were finally being released by well-known artists. “That was my confirmation. From then on, there was room for everything"

"I recently picked up Jean Vigo's dreamy 1934 story of a honeymoon couple heading to Paris on a barge. It's still startling and would have been way out on its own in 1934. Also included on the Artificial Eye DVD is his earlier short Zéro de conduite which was banned for years in France. An anarchic tale of kids taking over a boarding school. You can see how much Truffaut picked up from here and it was a direct influence on the 60s Lindsay Anderson film If. Vigo died young and L'Atalante was his only complete feature."

"Paul Farmer is one of the most impressive people I’ve had the honor of getting to know. He’s an amazing advocate for the health of the world’s poorest people, and he co-founded a system of health clinics in Haiti that reaches more than a million people in some of that country’s hardest-to-reach places. Melinda and I took our kids to Haiti this year so they could meet Paul and see the work he leads. In this book he really opens your eyes to the vast differences between the health of the rich and the health of the poor."

"The Warriors, only because it was such a brilliant… Well, actually, the reason why is because I did it as my first-ever stage play. We did a staged version of The Warriors, which is absurd, and it was, like, a lot of British kids running around hitting each other with polystyrene baseball bats. It was such a theatrical version of New York, of the gangs in New York, and it was visceral and sort of fun and energetic, and I loved it. I watched it when I was probably about 11, and kind of loved it."