"I’m cheating; I’m saying the Before trilogy. They’re just so real. You kind of check in with these characters, and each time, they’re sort of different, but it makes sense from the people that they were. You could see that these people, every ten years, would sort of become like this. Of those three, the one I’ve watched the most is Before Sunset. The ending of that movie just really gets me emotional every time. Oh my god, maybe I changed my mind. Maybe the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Who knows? It’s either the Before trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it’s different based on when you ask me during the day."

"One of the last books that we read as a company was Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. We have some incredible people working with Wondaland Records, and we knew that if we were going to be releasing five artists, including myself, we’d need to figure out a way to make sure we were on schedule. We wanted to find the quickest ways to get quality results we were all happy with. It solves problem on how we write music and how we run the company. It’s the way people use it in the tech industry, inspired by the tech world. It justifies the way we run Wondaland Records"

"When I finally set off for Gombe many people felt it would be a wonderful opportunity for me to spend hours reading. A couple of people even suggested I take a good book to read while I was waiting for chimpanzees to arrive in a fruiting tree, or when I was sitting, hoping to see some, on the peak. I was shocked: how could I be immersed in the world of the wild chimpanzees if I was reading books about another place, another time. But I did have one book with me – I was reading it when I left London. It was Monica Dickens One Pair of Hands. I read it many times when I had malaria!"

"Most people know Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson album, but what's interesting is that in the early '90s, he actually went into a dark, weird phase that French people don't really like. They consider his music from that time weak. But for me, it's the best. It's porn, it's queer, it's rap before that was a thing in France. It's just him mumbling obscene things on drum-and-guitar heavy production, really raw and tough. At the same time, it's poetic. The contrast is interesting: it's beautiful but dirty. On this album, Gainsbourg is hiding behind nothing. You get everything: the obsessions, the lust, the weaknesses, the scars. You see everything ugly and everything beautiful."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"We are indeed amusing ourselves to death. This started when Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium was the message. I said right away that the message was the medium. But, alas, my voice was maybe not loud enough, and/or the medium without a serious message is much more amusing to people. So the entertainers became the gods of the people, who screamed: “Keep entertaining us! We want to die being entertained!” The kings of the world wished the same, and they let their countries fall while they were entertained. This is the only book in this list that was published way back in the 1960s. I hope you can get it."

"Black Like Me, but I felt a way, because as I'm reading I realized it's about a white man dressed in black face in the '60s to see what it feels like to be black. It's cool to see these detailed experiences of how white people treated him, but at the same time, he was able to just go back to his regular white life. But we deal with this shit everyday. We can't just wipe our color off — which is great, I love my color, but it definitely made me feel a way. I'm still glad I saw the perversion that was happening with the treatment of black people, so for that reason, I appreciate the book."

"Bad Behavior is largely about sex, but it’s not cheesy or cheap. In this book of short stories, Gaitskill writes about women in the sex industry, people in power play relationships, S&M, and the general psychology of people who engage in so-called “bad behaviors” in a way that’s honest, sometimes brutal, and always beautiful. (For example, the darkly erotic film Secretary was adapted from a story in the book.) I first read this book around the time that I started Slutever, my blog about sexuality that still exists today, and it gave me confidence that writing about sex was a legitimate pursuit, and could be seen as intelligent, meaningful, and maybe even poetic."