Category: people

“If the tale of Rosemary Squire and Sir Howard Panter, the husband and wife team who built a theatrical empire from scratch, was ever turned into a play (and it would make a mighty fine one), then the first act’s set would centre round a little red BMW. Twenty-five years ago, … backstage space was tight and there was no cash left to rent an office. So Squire parked outside the theatre and – with one eye open for zealous traffic wardens – tackled her paperwork from the driver’s seat.”

“It’s beautiful, it’s paleolithic, it’s monumental, it’s dignified, it will never, ever let me down. It’s not going anywhere: it’s a metaphor for what I prefer to live with. I prefer to be single, doing everything I want to do and how I want to do it. … If I feel really low – anything from ‘I shouldn’t have said that’ to ‘I don’t feel very well’, to ‘I feel a bit lonely’ – I think about the stone and it actually makes me feel better.”

“In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. … This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive.”

“Handel’s investing career took a perhaps familiar course: after an initial, highly risky foray into the stock market, he decided to stick to safer assets that paid a steady income. In fact the shares he chose to buy in the early days were in the notorious South Sea Company, which ruined many investors, including Sir Isaac Newton.” (Handel, as it happens, got out in time.)

Michael Kurth on his Atlanta Symphony colleague, Jane Little, who died earlier this month at age 87: “When I feel sore and weary after a day of playing the bass, I remind myself that if an 87-year-old cancer patient with a broken vertebra who weighs 90 pounds soaking wet can do it, maybe I should stop whining and get back to work.”

“‘It’s nice and weird at the same time,’ she said of the attention the day after her movie’s first press screening. While here, she racked up 30 hours of interviews with 60 journalists from more than 15 countries.”

“She wanted to work in entertainment — but not in front of the camera. ‘It wasn’t like I was immersed in American entertainment, but I always liked the idea of storytelling on a big scale.'”

“You have to create a safe environment for everybody — both on the set and in the office — to come together and do their best work. You want them to emit that spark of light, like a firefly, but they may have to go back and forth and back and forth, changing their mind before they do.”

“I don’t care about ‘feed the trolls’ versus ‘don’t feed the trolls.’ I care about me, and what makes me feel better. And sometimes what makes me feel better is just making fun of some jackass. … And it’s important to me that these people know that harassing me online is not a consequence-free hobby.”

The artist, writer, and AIDS activist “was only 37 when he died, but he left behind an extraordinary body of work, particularly considering the uncongenial circumstances of much of his short life. A refugee from a violent family, a former street kid and teen hustler, he grew up to become one of the stars of the febrile 1980s East Village art scene, alongside Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.”