Category: people

“He achieved the status of chess master and, with the help of tactician Vitaly Halberstadt, even wrote a book on, yes, endgame strategy. It got a title similar to the names of his gnomic artworks: Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled. Retroactively, at least, his newfound passion conferred a depth and intensity of thought upon all those throwaway Dadaist sculptures.”

“In fact I’m living beyond my time, – because [the doctor] said Oct 15 was my last day ‘on live’ – The only reason I didn’t die on that date was that I wanted to read your latest story in Harpers.”

We have precedents for heinous personal beliefs coinciding with creative brilliance (Ezra Pound, Richard Wagner), and bigotry embodied in works of great formal achievement (“The Birth of a Nation,” “Triumph of the Will”), but this is an unusual case of an artist’s ideological extremism so suddenly exposed, and so plainly relevant to his art.

“Displacement pretty much excludes what my parents and many Sarajevans call ‘normal life,’ which is in many ways a nostalgic concept. … I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability – the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.”

“[There’s a] mode of memoir that I think is fundamentally puritan, in the sense that you have to publicly accept your sinfulness and describe your path of sin so as to be forgiven. The whole game annoys the hell out of me.”

Gisele Casadesus “made her first film in 1934 at the age of 20. She will turn 99 in June. In the last decade alone she has appeared in around a dozen films” – in fact, she has a new one just out.

The appointment is “in recognition of his efforts to promote intercultural dialogue through music, consciousness of the scarcity of natural resources such as water, and the diversity of languages, as well as for his dedication to the ideals and aims of the Organization.”

Merton D. Simpson “was an Abstract Expressionist painter and arguably the most significant dealer of traditional African art in the United States … But now his singular archive and extraordinary collection are matters of contention among an array of friends, family and staff members, who all claim to have his best interests at heart.”

“He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines.”

“When a number of us decided to pick up the pen and make writing a career there was no African literature as we know it today. There were of course our great oral tradition…”