"Octavia Butler is one of my top favorite authors, and my favorite sci-fi writer of all time. Her writing is always at the intersection of race, class — and in this instance, vampires. I love fantastical things, and because this focuses on vampires and not humans it adds another element of imagination. In the book, she’s having a conversation about racism, but through vampires, and you just never know where that’s going to go. You’re reading it, reading it, reading it, and then it takes a hard left, and you’re like Oh shit, I didn’t realize we were going to go into these deep political topics. Even though she always does that in her books. I’ve read pretty much all of them, but this was my favorite. She died pretty soon after she wrote it, so it has a lot of sentimental value for me."

"This is a humourous, irreverent and unabashedly political novel; it is an enraged lament about post-colonial Africa and how the leaders who inherited supposedly independent countries went on to fail their citizens. Some leaders are closely modelled on real characters – Mobutu of Zaire and Lumumba of the Congo are impossible to miss. The simplified summary of Kourouma: Colonialism has spawned monsters in the name of African leaders, and the West is the creator of these Frankensteins. The narrative is complex. There is a wonderfully oral quality to the telling, and many stories and anecdotes are laugh-aloud funny. Kourouma insists – and this underlies the narrative – that African dictators are mostly guided by their belief in the traditional, the supernatural, and that Islam or Christianity are mere window-dressing. This is a good example of an intelligent and important book that’s also genuinely interesting."

"This is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Even with the atrocities and torture, it has real texture and an aesthetic aspect to it. Even the shit looks special. Pasolini is a very dear person for me. You have people who are Christian filmmakers or left-wing filmmakers or liberal filmmakers, but then you have a person like him, just a gay leftist who made the best Bible movie ever. I think that says something about how he could catapult himself into these big political discussions in a way that not everyone can do. If Paul Greengrass made this movie, you would get something that would be interesting politically, but you wouldn’t get any kind of texture or beauty. So that’s what I really admire about Pasolini, that in the midst of all this torture and sadism the movie is still very beautiful and very unique."