Category: people

Says one former colleague, “She has great skills at bringing people together, keeping conversations at a very, very high strategic level, and not getting bogged down in the weeds. She has a wonderful graciousness about handling divergent points of view.”

“I don’t know how to explain it [what he’s currently writing]. I really don’t. Hopefully it’s a novel, but I have the hardest time sustaining prose. I feel like I’m a natural-born playwright but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?”

“I believe I have not reached my stride, which is why I persist. The day I turn to you and say, ‘John, what I just did in this role was a real winner,’ I hope you’ll have the courage and decency to throw a wreath around my head, and then so very quietly and compassionately shoot me.”

“Olivero never had a glitzy recording career, but she did have something her contemporaries didn’t: longevity. She sang in public for more than seven decades.” (includes audio clips)

“Penelope Niven was a high school English teacher, nearing 40, when she began work on a biography of Carl Sandburg. She had never written a book before. She didn’t have a Ph.D. in literature and hadn’t even been that familiar with Sandburg’s work.”

“The importance of being impressive seemed to dawn afresh on the German.”

Marjorie Strider added sculptural components to “paintings of plants and vegetables but also bright triptychs of bikini-clad women, adding what she called ‘build-outs’ to make the breasts and bottoms of the women emerge realistically out of the image, a challenge to the passive gaze.”

You young’uns who only know her for getting facelifts and yanking the chains of celebrities on the red carpet before awards shows: by the time she was your age, she was already a thriving stand-up and one of the best comedy writers in the business – and for a time in the 1970s and ’80s, she was one of the three or four most successful comedians in the entire English-speaking world.

“For her whole career, Rivers has been self-consciously pushing boundaries. In recent years she’s often spectacularly pushed the wrong ones, but we shouldn’t forget that, at one time, she was pushing the right ones – and doing it virtually alone.”

They’re serious. (They’re even working on a Dracula travel guide.)