Category: people

Jessa Crispin: “We all tell ourselves stories, as a way to understand and cope with what’s happening. … Stories were my way in. Those figures in the cards became characters and plot points. I would pull one card every morning, and then look for that character or that plot point in my own life. That argument I keep having with my ex, the one that never resolves? Five of swords.”

A two-time Nobel Prize nominee and one of the country’s most revered writers, “she was a fierce feminist who subverted the form of Iran’s traditional ghazals, love poems traditionally written by male admirers to women. Behbahani flipped the ghazals and wrote hers to men. She used them to write about a mother’s anguish over the loss of her son in the Iran-Iraq war and the horrors of stoning women to death.”

Nike Wagner, Wieland’s daughter, pretty much knew that she’d never lead the Bayreuth Festival once her uncle Wolfgang took over. (The job went to his daughters, Eva and Katharina; Eva is now retiring.) So she’s made her own way as a writer (including a predictably dirt-filled family tell-all) and dramaturg, and now she’s directing the world’s top Beethoven festival.

“The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.”

“I designed some costume events for these doctors … The male doctor was a kidney surgeon, and he wanted the magic power to immediately implant kidneys in people, so his alter ego was named Kidney Boy, and the female doctor was Dr. Snit, and she had pain issues. And I gave them some little flying kidney helpers, because you have to have helpers. And Dr. Snit got a magic wand with a little halo of Tylenols.”

“I had been told that it was derelict and vacant; that after Baldwin’s death in 1987 there had been legal disputes about who in fact owned the eighteenth-century Provençal building (Baldwin thought he did). The rusty padlock on the austere gates and the broken buzzer confirmed that the house was unoccupied. I glanced furtively around to check that no one was watching and prepared to scale the wall.”

His four-decade stint introducing NBC’s Saturday Night Live was just the highest-profile gig in a 70-year career that included (before most of you reading this were born) the original versions of The Price Is Right and Jeopardy!. (includes Weird Al video)

Jackie Chan: “I have a dilemma. I love action, but I hate violence. There is so much violence in the world, from video games and from other movies. I want my movies to have a message of peace, and helping each other. … There has to be plenty of action, but not violence.”

“Frankly, since the age of 20, all of the interviews I’ve done have involved people asking about my impending failure [after all the early success], and how I felt about the possibility of that. … Which is hard to deal with, because a lot of us already have those fears anyway: what if this doesn’t last for ever?; what if I don’t end up working in 10 years? So for other people to then be asking you about those things all the time is like having your innermost fears confirmed by somebody outside of yourself.”

“After the opera house was torn down, The Times reported in 1997, Miss Albanese could be seen on some fine days standing amid the rubble, dressed, as if in mourning weeds, in her Butterfly kimono.”