Category: people

“Painfully shy, a stutterer and facing bleak prospects as an man in the segregation era, Mr. Myers dropped out of the elite Stuyvesant High School and joined the Army on his 17th birthday. He wrote in his memoir, ‘Bad Boy’ (2001), that books were his friends as he fought despair.”

“Roger’s legacy to me is the thing he talked about — empathy being one of the most important aspects of civilization. Roger led with his head and his heart, but he did them simultaneously.”

“Everything with a Rolf Harris signature or name, from large-scale oil paintings and music albums to manhole covers in a council car park, are now being cast in a new light.”

“He sold more than 15 million copies of his more than 100 books. He was a National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and a three-time finalist for the National Book Award (in the Young People’s Literature category). He won the Coretta Scott King Award six times and was a Newbery Honor recipient twice. His slim, tightly focused novels most often took on the full scope of difficult lives.”

“I am very sorry about this, but I have been dodging the effects of PCA and have been able to write for much longer than any of us ever thought possible, but now The Embuggerance is finally catching up with me, along with other age-related ailments.”

“A gentle satirist of contemporary society, Mazursky at his best” – in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Blume in Love, An Unmarried Woman and Down and Out in Beverly Hills – “chronicled the social trends of the late 1960s and ’70s, including the era’s touchy-feely self-improvement fads, drug experimentation and shifting rules for love and sex.”

“It is strange because it still has that same smell that it had 16 years ago. Obviously the stains and everything else are touching me, and it’s like being touched by a ghost of yourself.”

“To make something, you have to be a deep-sea diver. You can have fear at the beginning, but then ultimately when curiosity takes over — at least this happens for me — then my fear goes away little by little because I get really interested in what I’ve discovered. We’re the R & D branch of the world, doing research and development all the time just to make an artwork. Making an artwork itself is a political statement in the world that we’re living in.”

“His poems, brainy and lyrical and often written in a voice that might be described as conversationally academic, are replete with referents, redolent of intellectual yearning and proudly high-minded … and though his work was always serious and often self-consciously grand, he also mixed lofty rhetoric with antic humor or sly wit and wrote with personal detail about people he knew.”

“A novel takes more than a week. … Novels tend to be too long, and they sink under their own weight – has anyone ever finished Moby-Dick? Anyone? They’re lying. A two-hour radio show is a hop, a skip, and a jump, with a bathroom break in the middle, and I am going to keep working on mine and maybe write one more Lake Wobegon novel, one with a dozen narrators.”