Category: people

“Before he began appearing at film festivals and collecting literary awards, when he was just another resourceful punk from Russia’s rust belt, Vassily Sigarev had a job delivering prostitutes to their customers in the concrete-slab housing blocks of Nizhny Tagil.”

“It’s only a fire when it offends the fans, and the fans turn on you. [Daniel] Tosh has fans, and they get the joke. If you’ve watched enough Tracy Morgan, you let the worst thing go by. When did Tracy Morgan become Walter Cronkite? You have to mean something to me to offend me. You can’t break up with me if we don’t date.”

David Greenberg: “Gore Vidal, talk of whose demise has been suffocatingly ubiquitous, was not just a world-famous intellectual – from the Mailer-Buckley-Galbraith era, when the term really meant something – but also a thoroughgoing nativist and bigot. He is not someone who deserves to be spared the rigors of a reckoning.”

We avoided having an open breach. But the last time [I saw] him he was obviously through with me. He was asked at some public event in New York whether he regretted making me his delfino, and he said perhaps he should withdraw it. And I was thinking, well perhaps I should do the same thing.’

“In the early 1960s, a 17-year-old girl called Helô Pinheiro would walk past the Veloso bar on the beachfront of Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, every day. She was ‘tall and tanned and young and lovely’ – and she was regaled by the men who drank there.”

“You can’t change people’s minds,” the nonagenarian once said. “But you can get them to think.” Is that what’s happening these days?

“[She wrote] 16 novels and several collections of short stories, most of which were built around the sometimes-awkward problems of women and families coming to terms with a changing Ireland in the second half of the 20th century. Although highbrow critics were not always kind to Ms. Binchy, her books sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and were translated into 37 languages.”

“His films resembled literary essays or epistles more than traditional documentaries, finding room for quirky personal observations, wit and seeming irrelevances. … His one brush with fiction was a 29-minute sci-fi short called La Jetée (1964) … [which] came to be regarded as Marker’s masterpiece, more for its form than its content.”

“With his powerful voice and beguiling style, Martin was enormously popular from the late 1930s through the 1950s as a singer who helped make standards out of such tunes as ‘Stranger in Paradise,’ ‘La Vie en Rose,’ ‘Fools Rush In,’ ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’ and many others.”

As a young soprano (then) in Los Angeles in 1954, Horne sang in the premiere of Stravinsky’s new version of Four Russian Peasant Songs – and she was coached by the composer himself. She became a close family friend. (And she can do a fabulous Stravinsky imitation).