"I've been dipping in and out of this book since my early 20s. I completely respond to one of its basic notions — self-responsibility. It's about preparing for a good death, and I've found that in having a child, you're confronted by your mortality each day as the child grows and blossoms. But every single element in our Western society is a denial of death. We don't want to think about it, which compounds the terror we feel about it. This book helps one to navigate one's way through the terror."

"All Quiet on the Western Front is a horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces."

"I would say Unforgiven is probably top of that list. What about it, is simply the way that Clint Eastwood demystified and destroyed our notion of a Western. I mean, demolished the genre; he turned it upside down. It was marvelous acting, and at times, his use of monologue and dialogue — that doesn’t ever take place in Westerns. He just took a baseball bat to the genre, and it was just incredibly profound to me. Wildly entertaining. He did things in the storytelling that hadn’t been done in the way that they were done. Incredible."

"Speaking of twisted, tragic, handsome, et cetera: Warren Oates is quietly the centerpiece of this picture. Or is it Laurie Bird? Probably Laurie Bird. She’s certainly at least as handsome and tragic. I may be conjuring up Warren Oates’s character in Monte Hellman’s more straight-ahead Cockfighter. This film is more passive. It rambles across scenic America, unconditionally picking up ramblers and spitting them out, while inviting you to aimlessly contemplate what it all means. I’m almost positive we stayed at that very Best Western in Albuquerque on tour."

"I thought this movie was mind-blowing. It’s a western and a morality play. It was everything. And of course [Toshiro] Mifune was so unbelievable. That impressed me for my whole childhood. It’s black and white but I remember it in color, which is weird. There’s another film — the Japanese films had a big effect on me. There’s a movie called Mishima, and this was about a suicide in Tokyo. Some movies are inextricably bound to a kind of era of expression and that’s another one from that same era."