Category: people

“One of the most explosive talents ever to come out of San Francisco Opera’s Merola and Adler programs, countertenor Brian Asawa had an illustrious – if at times troubled – career in opera and recitals around the world. He died on Monday after a long, unidentified illness”

“When a colleague kept comparing the colleges they had attended, Barris recalls, ‘I was like, ‘It doesn’t really matter where you went to school, because right now I’m looking at you across the table. So kudos to Harvard! Because we make the same money.’ ‘”

“The Lowood episode is the most frightening boarding school story ever written, and, of course, all children, me included, think they are friendless, persecuted and despised, and identify with the poor orphan.”

“Myles has a theory about her resurgent popularity — you might call it the Theory of the Bad Copy, which posits that most people who are breaking with the past do so by presenting initially as bad copies of an accepted person.”

“I used to think, why am I putting myself through this? There’s enough tension and anxiety in my life already. But it was all I could do with the means that I had, which was me, and myself.”

“For me, photography is all about youth. … It’s about a happy world full of joy, not some kid crying on a street corner or a sick person.”

“Let me join the right honourable gentleman,” intoned the Prime Minister, donning the sombre mien of one for whom the news had come as a personal shock, “in mourning the loss of…” Oh drat. What was the chap called? Blast it. He knew he should have written it down.

“One of the wildest moments she said she remembers of her tenure was the day in 1981 when she got home, turned on her television and learned that Maxim and Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer’s son and grandson, had defected. Rostropovich was due back in the office the following Tuesday, but on the Monday, “I opened the door to his office,” she recounts, “and Maxim Shostakovich was staring me in the face. There was Dmitri; there was Slava. Slava said, ‘I think you see what we need.’ ”

“The Peruvian writer was a leading candidate for his country’s presidency in 1990, is the last survivor of a literary movement that re-energized the novel in our time and is probably the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to compare the joys of writing, in his 2010 Nobel lecture, to ‘making love to the woman you love, for days, weeks, months, without stopping.'”

“Nelle Harper Lee scoffed at her National Treasure status. … [She] was more like the National Antidote – probably she would have preferred emetic, or gag reflex, something that expressed her unwillingness to humor the Chamber of Commerce or our contemporary age of ubiquity and oversaturation.”