"This might have been the first film that made me realize what type of filmmaker I was going to be. The faces and personalities are so vivid. I always wonder if people would care about this simply observed masterpiece if it were produced today, after the advent of reality TV and YouTube."

"I think about this film all the time. It has a real nice shape to it. The final shot is a terrifying portent, but for some reason I find it oddly hopeful. It's a useful jumping-off point when I’m thinking about what I want people to get out of my own movies."

"Perhaps the best introduction to another great original of the English novel, who learned from Firbank's economy, but who had his own quite different imaginative world. Loving, set among the servants of an Irish country house, combines his superbly truthful ear for how people really speak with an unforgettable vein of surreal poetry."

"The lives of ordinary people in a second rate city are given depth and tragic resonance in sensually realized prose. “The Dead,” in particular succeeds in rendering a perfectly realistic scene: a holiday party, brilliantly capturing different voices and registers, and then wallops us with a vision of life, love, death and meaning."

"A strange and beautiful book about the lonely souls and thwarted dreamers who inhabit a small Ohio town. There’s no sentimentality in Anderson’s vision, no nostalgia for middle America in a simpler time. Winesburg is a place where people are doomed to remain a mystery to their neighbors, and even to themselves."