"I’m gonna have to say Mary Poppins. I’m really gonna say it. If it was on right now, I would hang up on you and start watching it. There’s no way I could ever not watch it if it was on, so I think that’s a sign of it being one of your top five. It’s so… merry. You can’t watch that and not feel good, and I love Glynis Johns, the woman who plays the mother, and I love Julie Andrews. I mean, when it was windy in Oklahoma City when I was a kid, I used to get my umbrella and go out and try to fly. I think I actually did a few times, but don’t tell anybody. Just the magic of it all. I love it."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"I know that the novella "Tonio Kroger" is not Thomas Mann’s greatest work. There is some part of me that feels that I should be putting up “Buddenbrooks” or “The Magic Mountain” here. And there’s a strong case for “Death in Venice,” too. But this is the book of his that felled me completely when I read it as a German student in my teens. All Mann’s enduring themes are here: the struggle between duty and love, between the febrile pleasure and teutonic responsibility; and the lethal vulnerability of the lover, set against the wanton cruel power of the beloved. It’s an anguished worldview, which is what spoke so directly to the adolescent reader I was, but no one reads Thomas Mann for woo-woo life-enhancing sentimentality."