"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."

"Before the segmentation of TV brought on by cable, I first saw this on one of the UK’s four channels. Back then, you could always stumble upon strange and wonderful movies like this . . . and the whole family would watch. Often this made your enjoyment all the sweeter if a parent or sibling didn’t get it. I watched 3 Women with my first girlfriend and her mother. When the movie finished, the Ma said, “I couldn’t make head or tail of that, but I do know it was sick and perverted.” I said to her, “It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.” She didn’t much approve of me as a beau for her one and only daughter before we watched the movie, but afterwards she thought I was the anti-Christ."

"Jessica Mitford was part of the legendary English aristocratic Mitford family. Her sisters included the novelist Nancy, Diana, who was imprisoned with her husband Sir Oswald Mosley for being a fascist, Unity, who fell in love with Hitler, and Deborah, who became the Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica was the family communist and eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. Some of the best bits of the book are her descriptions of her childhood. Their poor mother, desperate to knock some sense into her unruly girls, would make them sit down each week and write out how they would economize for a family on an income of 200 pounds a year. Every week without fail Nancy would write at the top of her paper, “199 pounds : flowers.”"

"It was my mother's favourite song. He has one of the smoothest voices in music ever. There's a strange sort of reverb going on there that's also present in 'Blue Velvet' by Bobby Vinton. Subconsciously, some part of me wanted to emulate what my mother found to be romantic. Again at a young age, I found that this was romance. Here was what made the girls smile because he was a huge heart-throb as well. So that early crooning, soft romantic style was a blueprint for us early on. From time to time I dive into it, as it's one of the constellations that's always in the sky for me. In fact, it's always on the radio and played more than Britney Spears or Alicia Keys, but only on oldies stations."

"This is a strange book, but it’s strange because it’s packed with so many great characters. It’s the story of a little boy, Owen Meany, who has a peculiar voice and believes he is an instrument of God. He and his friend Johnny are on a Little League team when Owen hits a foul ball that kills Johnny’s mother. From that moment, the boys’ lives are intertwined. I could picture and smell and hear what Owen Meany was like. Irving captures the innocence of youth, of people growing up together and figuring out who they want to be, and discovering the pain of separation—that made the book great for me. It’s about faith and fate, and how you don’t know who the messenger is going to be."