"This is one of the most bizarre, exhilarating, strange, intense books I've ever read. I mean all of this in a good way. The book's chapters are fractured looks at an even more fractured family. The book feels less like a story about them and more like a lived experience inside their psyche. Each chapter reads like a short experimental film about each character. They are beautiful, poetic abstractions on the human condition."

"A wonder. If I had to choose the best movie ever made, I’d choose 8 1/2. It’s so rich, so free, so influential. It has such a high energy in its form, an energy that never stops. It’s like a strong river that never stops flowing. It also has one of the most wonderful endings in film history. Something extraordinarily surprising, poetic, and reasonable in a way you wouldn’t have expected."

"Angels inhabit the earth and long to be human because the pain and love of mortality is beautiful. Wim Wenders mixes color with black and white, dialogue with voice-over, aerial with handheld cinematography, and the historical with the magical in this intimate, poetic vision of ordinary life. This film came out when I was in college and was so new and fresh that many of us saw it on a weekly basis."

"A dark and unknown masterpiece of animated cinema: the adventures of a little girl taken in by circus freaks who make her suffer the worst atrocities – until our young heroine falls madly in love with the dwarf of the troupe. Its inventiveness is both incredibly visual and poetic, and Midori imprints its barbaric and desperate mark on your soul for a long time after seeing it. The nightmarish counterpart to Miyazaki’s films."