"I was obsessed with Dennis Cooper during my early 20s. Admittedly, I don’t connect to his writing so much anymore, but his fiction had such an impact on my early writing that I couldn’t leave this book out. His work generally explores sex, death, boredom, perversion, sex work, and usually follows a sexually fluid and/or confused male protagonist who’s tall and deathly thin—aka my exact “type”—so besides being a literary influence, Cooper’s books were also a form of porn for me, I suppose."

"Choice number three may or may not surprise you, but I absolutely loved, loved, loved Hidden Figures. If I were a young African-American woman, I would ask the question: Why did I not know about this story before now? And even as a 69-year-old white male, I want to know why I didn’t know about that story. It’s so inspiring. It’s almost like a fact-checked Frank Capra movie for the 21st century, and really, really, really got me psyched up about it."

"Male camaraderie, male love, is a difficult subject to show on film. What does it mean to have one of your best friends pass away? When that unit dies, how do you deal with it? I’m not a married man but I’m sure that when I’m married and have kids I’ll see Husbands in a new light. It’s regular guys trying to make sense of this life, having a good time while they’re doing it; running from their own lives and trying to distract themselves with hookers and gambling and drinking, and they all have families to go back to. They just don’t wanna leave the party. It’s male camaraderie at its most loving and brutal: these guys are terrible to each other, but they’d do anything for each other, and that kind of friendship, those values, mean a lot to me. The way they shot the film, the way they lost funding — there’re these wild stories of how to make a movie that you care about. They lost financing. As the story goes, they put the last bit of money — and they’re half way through the film, they’ve been shooting for six months — they put all the money to throw a party. They got dancers and girls and piano players and I think there was like an elephant, and they invited all these studio heads to come to this party sequence that they were filming — and when they studio saw the scene they said, “This movie’s huge, it’s wild, we’ll cover the rest of the film.” They got the rest of the financing. The scene’s not in the movie — it was never planned to be. So that spirit still excites me. The camaraderie feels familiar."