Category: people

“The obituaries of some of the most-celebrated and greatly-missed artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers who died in 2012.”

“Mr. Bennett wrote three symphonies, 17 concertos, five operas and dozens of elegant chamber works in a style that fused the avant-garde theories of Pierre Boulez, one of his teachers, with his own flexible, lyrical, nondogmatic approach.”

“His books will last as long as there are people on the planet, but he’s gone, and he’s taken with him the irreplaceable pleasure – the unique amalgamation of delightful nuttiness, naked, unapologetic need, wild associations and prodigious, profligate spontaneous invention – that could be had in his company.”

“No longer must celebrities of yore resort to appearing on campy reality shows to remind the public they exist.”

“[The] three-time Emmy Award-winning actor [was] best known for his portrayals of slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison on TV’s The Odd Couple and the title role of the murder-solving medical examiner on Quincy, M.E.”

“‘No, that is not Mr. Roth posting on Twitter,’ a press representative for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which publishes Mr. Roth’s books, said in an e-mail on Wednesday. The Twitter account, @PhilipRothOffic, published its first post on Monday, which read: ‘I join Twitter today. It’s easy …”

“We strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins, not broken columns.”

How do you think a Chinese liberal, sitting on a bench in a drab prison, would feel to hear an American liberal, sitting on a couch with the Guardian, say “you and I both live under oppressive governments, my friend; I must pause before criticizing yours”?

King wrote the magazine article that became The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. “He wrote in a good ol’ boy vernacular style similar to other Southern authors such as Roy Blount and Charles Portis.”

“At Seventeen, which she edited from 1975 until her retirement in 1993, Mrs. Richardson was known for introducing frank discussions of delicate subjects — including sex, anorexia and suicide — from which the magazine, aimed at teenage girls and long considered a bastion of wholesomeness, had traditionally shied away.”