"Simple storytelling at its best, character driven, beautiful and cinematic. The ending of that movie, if you’re not feeling good and your heart’s not twisted up and then melted back together then, I mean, I dunno, you don’t have a heartbeat. It’s one of the best feelings walking away from a piece of cinema. It’s all chalked up to really great characters. A really simple story, really. And that’s why I really enjoy it. It’s a beautifully… it’s a masterpiece. It’s a masterpiece of filmmaking in its simplicity. Its characters are lovely and tormented and flawed and beautiful and heroic. And I, again, love the themes of it."

"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."

"Huge, magical, realist epic about Indian Independence through the eyes of a child born on the stroke of midnight. Funny, dense, flowery, the story goes on huge tangents, but I love this crazy novel, which somehow manages to depict and sum up the essence of the incredible vast country of India. A real education for me as someone who grew up in London, who had never been to India while growing up. This book helped me better understand what my parents had been through, where they came from before they chose to travel across the world to settle in the the U.K., where I was born."

"As a screenwriter first and foremost (and a director with little to no innate visual sense), I tend to prize narrative and story over most other elements in film. Amarcord arguably has neither. And yet I love it. I want to live in this town, wander among these streets, live with these characters. It also has an oddly casual sense of horny humor that remains surprisingly shocking. A throwaway moment of a car full of teenage boys masturbating never fails to make me laugh out loud. It also revels in odd details—a priest smelling his fingers, for example. It’s so gross. And yet so awesome."