Category: people

“A leading Syrian artist has been released after being held by the Syrian authorities for more than two months. Youssef Abdelke was arrested on 18 July, along with two colleagues, by forces loyal to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, at a checkpoint in Tartous, a southern port city.”

“So of course first they think I’m just lying. But they are fast learners. … They are all very smart, intelligent people. It’s only because their job limits them to a very limited position. … One day they came back in to interrogate me some more and they were very happy, as if they had made a great breakthrough in the case: ‘OK, we found out! You’re part of Dada.’ I said, ‘Ahh, yes, you’re a little closer.'”

It was not, as our schoolteachers once taught us, from a measure of the water’s depth on the Mississippi. It wasn’t from the riverboat captain that Clemens himself claimed to have taken it from. It wasn’t even from (as the story went) his bar tab at the Nevada saloon he used to frequent. The name came from someplace that, for Clemens at that time, was even more disreputable.

“I’m not the first to suggest it, but it’s time to take the idea seriously. The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded posthumously, and Mr. Dylan, now in his 70s, has battled heart disease. Alfred Nobel’s will decreed that the prize should go to a writer with “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Why hasn’t Bob Dylan received one?”

“My intention with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) was to replicate the sort of fear you might feel on being confronted with a shark. It’s the fear of death, but I’ve always noticed kids love it rather than being frightened of it.”

“For all of her achievements — seven bestselling books and an army of fans who turned out for every cooking class — Hazan was an accidental cookbook writer.”

“He brought every major motion picture star from Mexico to the Million Dollar Theater for decades. Then, when he went to Channel 34, he brought them live to television. He was a one-man band bringing live Mexican talent to this community.”

Kofi Awoonor, considered Ghana’s greatest modern writer of poetry, in Nairobi for a pan-African literary festival, was one of dozens killed in a Somali terror group’s occupation of the Westgate mall. Teju Cole pays tribute to Awoonor and reports from a memorial held at the festival.

“I’ve had really good luck with my looks. I had them when I needed them but never too much that I couldn’t obliterate them with great ease when I didn’t. I have this ridiculous big round moon-pie face and this kooky smile and no eyes left whatsoever. … It’s a good character face. So I guess my vanity usually is about how successfully I can pull off the character.”

“Ninety-nine per cent of decisions are predicated on feelings – instinctive, emotional, fears, conflicts, unresolved childhood problems. They’re our dominant motivating factor, not reason or rationality or common sense. And that’s why the world is in a terrible, terrible state.”