"I’ve started writing a lot of songs recently; I’ve always written but I put my writing on hiatus because Tim’s such a great songwriter for Keane and I think I felt a bit deflated by how good he was, but recently I’ve got back into it. Carole King, I don’t know why, but something about the way that she talks about her emotional world, I find really engaging. It’s romantic, in a way, in a broader sense, and just beautifully crafted. Every time I sit down and try and write a song, I have her somewhere in the back of my mind. The great songs have a real sense of precision, there’s no dead space, you know every bit’s there for a reason. I like 'So Far Away'; I grew up in a small town and I always found it annoying, even though I did this myself, that people would leave! Because they felt that’s what they had to do - I’m not annoyed with them, I’m annoyed that that’s the way of the world, you have to leave your roots. I suppose I did the same thing, it’s a necessity of modern society, but it frustrates me. I used to sit around thinking, "Where are all my old mates who used to live down the road?" And that song, its wistful longing for people to stay put in a world that’s growing so fast. It’s a timeless record"

"In many ways the perfect double bill with Young Mr. Lincoln. Democracy in America, Part II. There is a lot of carbon dating at work in this movie (how an interior, a suit, a gesture spell class—as in middle or working—and the historic moment, 1969, in which these classes function); but this unfurling of specificity is there to give us its metaphysical sense and resonance (the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success). A lot has to do with the amount of space the frame encloses and how resolutely off center it chooses to remain. For all its relentless attention to the matter at hand, Salesman is never a claustrophobic film. It is a film that often goes one (or two or three) better on what a long line of American writers (from Dreiser on) have tried to pin down. Which might explain why Salesman often feels like a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character, registering the cusp moment after which it will cease to do so. One can look at Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind; one can—maybe naively—take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre might still produce; one can celebrate the film as definitively proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. I tend to go for the latter."