"Love Liza, it’s such a random thing. I saw it — I can’t remember if my buddy bought it at a DVD store or it was on NYU TV or something — but I remember watching it and just being so transfixed by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance. I just really love that movie a lot. Honestly man, I think that was one of the first independent films I’d seen. I wasn’t huge into the independent film scene until I went to college, and then of course, once you get to NYU, it’s all about the indie scene, you know. But I love independent filmmaking; I think they’re really telling the interesting stories."

"Let’s see, number two… see I don’t know what order to put these in, but let’s have [laughs] — it’s going to be a really weird top five — Muppet Christmas Carol. It’s just so good. It’s got a bit of everything: brilliant characterization, great songs; just beautifully shot. A warm, cozy, nice feeling, I think is what that film is. And Michael Caine is good. I think it’s great the way they used a lot of the different Muppet characters in the story, and they kind of fit with the characters — you know, you’ve got the old guys as the ghosts; it just all worked so well. Beautifully done. Love it."

"Amazingly, Joyce basically tells you how to be a writer here, in one of the most dazzling, lucid, visceral memoirs. The passage where he describes standing in the mouth of a shallow, pebbly river, at sunset, having a revelation about the rest of his life, is scientifically provable to get you as high as a quarter of an MDMA tablet. But the modern reader can't help but note that, as a story of a working class adolescent who thinks he's intellectually superior to everyone around him, is desperate to be a writer, and wanks a lot, Portrait of a Young Artist is also incredibly similar to."

"I was immersed in jazz for a while. I had certainly been aware of it for years, particularly the electric Miles Davis stuff, but this was a period where I went back into it and listened to a lot of Thelonious Monk records. I really love those; they’re so spiky-sounding. There was a whole bunch of Miles Davis electric records that were just never released in this country. I think Columbia or CBS or whoever it was just decided, “We don't like this stuff. We’re not gonna release it.” So you’d have to get the Japanese version CD. But it’s just amazing stuff."

"If anyone comes to my house in the country and has never seen this film, I always show it. So, in a way, I am emulating — in that action — exactly Auntie Mame. It is a joyous, crazy cartoon of a movie that has a little bit of everything, but at the heart is this woman we’d have all loved to have known and have taken us under her wing. I also love wall-to-wall speaking in film, and you sure get a lot of dialogue in this one. And who could resist a catch phrase like “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death”!"

"“This book gives you a true picture of American world politics that we have not been told. While at consulting firm Chas T. Main, Perkins claims to have worked as an ‘economic hit man,’ cheating developing nations out of trillions by convincing their leaders to accept development loans that ultimately turned into massive debts. It took a lot of courage to write this book because the author, an economic strategist, reveals that he was involved in swindling countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. He is a very brave individual who has stood up to share the truth; my late husband, John, would have liked that."