"I stand by ‘Suzanne’ as having the best lyric and melody of all time – it’s unbelievable, the guy’s a genius. All of the songs on the album are standout tracks. Bowie got me looking out the window and imagining the world of Ziggy Stardust, but what Cohen does is he turns me into him. I’d seen Bird On The Wire in a little cinema when I was 14, and went out and bought all his albums. It’s kind of like I’m with Suzanne or whoever. I don’t really like story-telling songs, but his lyrics are so simple and poetic; religious and laconic. It’s genius the way he writes lyrics, spinning things on their head, and by the fourth line you have to read it again and again. He flips it round - it’s what I do a lot. I always thought of him as the King of Hearts - Lou would be the King of Spades, the Velvets would be the Clubs, Bowie would be the Queen of Diamonds and Leonard would be the Hearts."

"I was twenty years old when I first saw it. It terrified me then, and still does.
 The preacher, played by Robert Mitchum, is the most frightening
 psychopath I’ve ever seen depicted. This is the only film directed by Charles Laughton, and its haunting, over-the-top storytelling is reminiscent of Laughton’s own character portrayals. The poetic, expressionistic images are by Stanley Cortez, a true American master who I fortunately came to know many years before his death. Stanley photographed, among others, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Three Faces of Eve, in which his lighting is equally unique. The disturbing orchestral score is by Walter Schumann, who also wrote the Dragnet theme and whose music underlines and drives the horror the way Bernard Herrmann’s does in Psycho. This is one of James Agee’s rare screenplays—another was The African Queen—and it captures America in the Depression as
 well as did his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans. The film’s story is an American equivalent of the Brothers Grimm."

"I think this song is fun and sort of ridiculous, it's bombastic and big. There's so much reverb on ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’, it's crazy. He’s on the record cover with the women and he called it Death of a Ladies' Man! It's so beautiful and it's very well written, but it's kind of through this filter that you can't help but just kind of laugh loud. “There’s that song called ‘Memories’ where he sings “Your naked body...” and it’s just ridiculous; it's playful and fun in a way that only Leonard Cohen really knew how to be. If you listen to some of his interviews he's such a poetic man and he knows exactly how to say whatever he wants to say. Sometimes he chooses to say funny things and that record is kind of like that to me. “When you discover albums like this, you're like, 'There's actually really great songs in here, the production is insane, but what he's saying is really cool.' He was in his fifties at that point; he was drinking tea"

"I mean, all of them. I remember the first night my parents let me stay home alone I rented Metropolitan for the sexy VHS cover—I stayed up till morning trying to talk like those characters. And The Last Days of Disco is low-key brutal in its honesty about post-college party life. But man, everything really clicks into place with Barcelona—Cold War Spain, super early Mira Sorvino, prime Chris Eigeman, the stylish but not mannered cinematography, a broad eighties definition of “jazz.” I’ve been thinking about what’s so liberatingly beautiful about Stillman’s dialogue. It’s how everyone is trying to be so precise—and hearing that thought process is very rare in films. And how that extreme precision generates its own excesses and poetic absurdism. Like the crystalline moment: “Plays, novels, songs, they all have a subtext, which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind . . . So subtext, we know . . . But what do you call . . . what’s above the subtext?” “The text.” “OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.”"

"I love David Cronenberg and everything he is about. He’s crawled inside my head and shown me dreams I never thought I’d have. His seminal 1983 psychodrama about the power of the media to corrupt and manipulate the minds of the people through sex and violence is as prophetic as it is horrifying. The mind-boggling effects dreamt up by Cronenberg and the master Rick Baker are a work of art unto themselves. It’s prophetic and horrifying and fascinating. Poetic, where other horror films are just gruesome and punishing. And Cronenberg gives a great commentary in conversation with longtime DP Mark Irwin. The edition also contains one of my favorite special features ever: Fear on Film, a half-hour roundtable discussion with Cronenberg, John Landis, and John Carpenter, who were all making classic horror films at Universal at the same time. It’s a nice little taste of what it must have been like to be around at a revolutionary time for American horror. I wish I had been there"