"I love Roland Kirk's stuff, it's always got these mad quirky bits in it, a bit like Mingus or like Monk, but very unique to him. It's a really sweet record, really beautiful, and again it has a link to nature and spirituality. It's deep but it has a lot of humour. Charming arrangements and melodies and a real lightness of touch. I love all those things where you hear him growl on the flute or shout or let off one of his conches."

"Bo Widerberg is – like, to a certain extent, Jan Troell – one of the great modern filmmakers who has been least recognized. In a way, he was a Swedish Pialat – another great filmmaker whose international recognition remains problematic – his cinema intensely sensitive, inscribing itself in an osmosis with nature observed with an eye like that of the impressionists. The dry lyricism in this work is also that of revolutionary hopes at a labor movement’s inception, a lyricism also found in another of his films, Joe Hill."

"I was tempted to include the complete works of Shakespeare, but I'll instead cite a great play that echos with “The Odyssey.” “Coriolanus,” is Shakespeare's most sustained depiction of a war veteran, which presents a brutal and heart-breaking portrait of ultra-masculinity and how it can break a man. There’s also “The Tempest,” about islands, magic, the sea, power, exile and colonialism, whose rich, vivid descriptions of nature were very much in my mind when I was working on my translation of “The Odyssey.”"