"When we talk about great American songs, this is the ground zero for the way that I listen and write. Or at least aspire to write. In at least a moment in my career, there's a timeless gem embedded at the heart of it, like 'When You Wish Upon A Star' or 'Star Dust'. It's not making songs for the moment, it's stepping out and making the best you can, making it timeless. It's not a great way of saying it, but a lot of the songs on my Baker's Dozen list have moments in them. They can still hit you as hard as they can hit people in 1938. That is something I feel is worth aspiring to. It's not something you can dial up in a program, you can't force it or pretend you've got it when you haven't; it's just there. It's a higher spiritual essence that you know is there in you; on your best days you're just hoping to reveal some of it."

"My favorite of all Fellini’s films, it seems his most perfect and certainly his most likable and affecting. And it’s his most comical, thanks to the wonderful performances of Leopoldo Trieste and, especially, Alberto Sordi, who went on to star in over three hundred films in Italy and is rightly regarded as their greatest actor. Its story also prefigures the theme of three of his later films (La dolce vita, Toby Dammit, and Ginger and Fred), as to the corrosive effect of the new media religion of celebrity. In 1950, the inroads of paganism on Christianity still seemed only foolish when a photo¬-comic-book character almost destroys a Catholic marriage. But already by 1959, the lust for media attention had become all consuming and malignant in La dolce vita, where a journalist goes from one idiotic media event to another, including an imagined miracle in the rain. In Toby Dammit, on a nightmarish TV talk show, the church itself parades in front of the TV cameras; and in Ginger and Fred, about another ridiculous TV celebrity program, it has all become totally absurd, only momentarily relieved by a nostalgia for older performers. Half a century later, the celebrity media religion rules, and there is no end to its reign in sight."