"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"Carolyn Cassady was the wife of Neal Cassady who is the hero in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” She was his wife, but also an artist and art teacher, and she was linked to this absolute lunatic of a man who was her Achilles heel. He regularly betrayed her, but you love who you love. She had a love affair with Kerouac as well—weirdly because Neal Cassady suggested it. She was an incredibly gifted writer, but she was managing these crazy men in her life and bringing up her children and I guess she didn’t see herself in that way. But she wrote with so much intuition and insight, and a lot of beauty as well."

"When I first met Peter Quill in Kyln, I ain’t never heard of a “raccoon,” but he made me watch this movie and… aww flarg, I loved it! It’s a gritty tale about a wily raccoon that gets abducted by one of Quill’s ancient ancestors in some cheese hut called “Wisconsin.” The little guy unleashes a whole lot of krutack on his captors and eventually cons the kid into letting him go free. It reminded me of my own childhood, when I got stuck in a lab on Halfworld. That’s where I met my best bud Groot. This flick had us bawling like saplings. BUT DON’T TELL QUILL! I don’t want him to know we was gettin’ sentimental…"

"The other one in the comedy genre is an all-time classic, Coming to America. Like Harlem Nights, Coming to America, the rawness of it, Eddie and Arsenio’s relationship, just all the different characters Eddie was able to play and pull off — not a shabby job, Arsenio played a lot of characters himself — but the brilliance of Eddie Murphy. If they gave Oscars for comedies back then, that would have been the top of the list. You know, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor turned in some incredible ones, too, but I tend to love what Coming to America was all about. Just the fact that it was New York, and how it started and where it went."

"That title track, it really affected me emotionally. I can't really explain why, but it really got under my skin. We were going to a lot of parties and stuff, and that was always the track that was played, and everybody would get up and start dancing to it. I love most of the Bowie stuff, but '"Heroes"' and that whole era, I found it really moving. "Heroes" was a rebellion inspiration, an "I told you so"-type thing. It seemed to be very anti-establishment, and something your parents wouldn't approve of, so we loved it. I've never seen Bowie, though we did play a tour supporting him in South America."

"I went to see The Spirit of the Beehive at Film Forum on a whim only a few years ago, when it was rereleased, and it immediately became one of my favorite movies ever. It opens with a town full of kids, all yelling “The movie’s here! The movie’s here!” while running alongside a truck carrying a print of Frankenstein to the church where it will be screened. From there, you are swept right into the life and story of a thoroughly compelling little girl with beautiful brown eyes, a sister, a cat, a big house, a fair dose of anxiety, and a lot of free time in stressful post-civil-war Spain."

"Cassavetes’ movies to me are a kind of pure energy. He’s the very opposite of Ozu because he cared nothing at all about form. Yet for some strange reason, by not caring about form at all—he just went for it—this produced, in formal aspects, the same result as when you pay a lot of attention to form. His energy with actors can also be felt. In each shot, you can feel what he wants to tell us about story, and you get the feeling that this has to be acted now, shot in the very moment. I would say it’s possibly something very American. This pure energy of making is very American, and it’s very optimistic."

"This is tough because they are a lot of guys in here, but you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to go with The Court Jester. I feel that it’s a perfect movie and contains some of the best sword fighting ever. I’m not always on the Danny Kaye boat, but this is the one where it threads the needle. He’s genius in this movie, and the plot is gorgeous, and everybody in it is funny. It’s so beautifully constructed, and they’re singing, and the world’s greatest sword fight between him and Basil Rathbone. It’s utterly committed to being as silly as it can be and it works like gangbusters."

"Like I say, it all happened at the same time when I was 18, when I suddenly discovered all of that 60s culture. Really, The Beatles should be there as well but I wanted to avoid putting stuff on the list that was too obvious. Also with this list, I wanted some stuff that was formative, as opposed to just the stuff I listen to a lot and there's something about that album, Forever Changes. I don't know what it is about 1967, I hadn't really thought about that. 69's a good year as well. 64 was a really good year, 59 was a good year. 73 was a good year."