"She’s brilliant beyond brilliant. I was reading this at this black hair salon while I was getting my braids done so I felt like the best of all of America. Ephron has a way with language and jokes. She’s very much a writer who uses her personal life to fuel her work. It’s really funny. Women who are older, people ignore their contributions, but people always craved her writing and her take on the world, and it’s a testament to her skills as a writer, and how she could get you into her world and make you want to be a part of it and keep reading."

"Istanbul, London, Madrid, Boston…ever since my childhood I lived in numerous countries. One of the downsides of a nomadic life is that you can never keep a proper library. At some point, I had boxes of books in Istanbul, waiting to be shipped, boxes of books in Arizona. You have to let go of even your most beloved possessions when you live a peripatetic life, but there was one author whose voice I could never do without: James Baldwin—the observer, the commuter, the rebel. Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays about language, racism, hatred, and ultimately, resilience and dignity."

"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written."

"Robert's voice does the same to me as Antony's – it's all about vulnerability and power together. I also love Robert's playfulness in his language, in the way he makes music, and his humour. It's like he makes up his own rules. 

And to think of what he'd experienced: to have been this virtuosic drummer having to change his whole way of making music. He's always taking me on lots of different journeys when I listen to him. He also came to see us singing his songs live once, which was terrifying! But he was so generous and so full of warmth afterwards though, which just as I'd expected from his songs."

"It’s the first of Haneke’s film I saw. When we were in film school, Sean [Durkin] called me and said, "You've got to see this film." We went to the NYU library and he first showed me two scenes: the one on the train where Juliette Binoche gets spit on and the red room scene where she gets directed off screen by Haneke. It was one of these moments where I had been waiting to see a film language that really spoke to me and this film had it, it made so much sense to me. From there I fell in love with Haneke."

"This novel is cited by many of my author friends as the best in the English language. I, too, am awed by its beauty and intelligence, so much so that I sometimes feel I should stop writing. (I won’t.) The narrator of this story has been bestowed with telepathic powers by virtue of the time of his birth. This proves useful in recounting his life, which is coincidentally wrapped around historical events in India. Rushdie injects much political criticism of the powers that came to be, and this trait in his writing recalls for me George Orwell’s treatise on why we write: politics has much to do with it."