Category: people

“Why not do something strange and different for once? Artists can do whatever they want! I’m really open to seeing what will happen and what consequences it will have.”

“People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don’t think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.”

“What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

Harriet the Spy in both cases. As a kid I just thought it made me want to be a spy. But now I see that it’s an excruciatingly accurate depiction of the compulsion to write (and draw — Louise Fitzhugh illustrated the book herself), and the toll that this exacts on one’s life.”

“Pichler was a sculptor and illustrator whose works included a white, torpedo-shaped helmet with a television inside it (Portable Living Room), a rusty bed frame supporting a humanoid form divided by sheets of jagged glass, and numerous drawings and models of fantastical structures, among them floating cities and underground buildings.”

“Lupe Ontiveros, who died Thursday at age 69, was an actress whom many knew from her comedic supporting roles in movies and television. But Ontiveros was also a long-standing member of the Los Angeles theater community and served as a founding board member of the Latino Theater Company in downtown L.A.”

“Mr. Mawbey said that he can’t remember the last time he was able to get true white hair. ‘I’ll ask them if they have gotten it in and they’ll laugh at me,’ he said. ‘Older women aren’t going out and selling their hair.’ He said that the price would be many multiples higher than typical dark hair, but he wasn’t sure of an exact figure. On the rare occasions when he was able to procure it, it has typically been in bundles of very short hairs, which he used to keep in a small stash for partially bald actor Sean Connery.”

“Encounters with West’s art are often occasions for laughter, though it is a laugh tinged with horror and disbelief. He could deflate the pomposity of the city square or the elegance of a park with his giant pink phalluses and lime-green sausages. Sitting on dignified plinths, his skewed and lumpy sculptures, often garishly painted, had a kind of idiot elegance.”

The much-admired German star, who “appeared in [Michael] Haneke films such as The White Ribbon and Funny Games as well as alongside Kate Winslet in The Reader, specialised in playing vulnerable, damaged women who found hidden reserves of strength. The Austrian director Haneke frequently looked to her to embody characters pushed to the limit.”

“[He] received an Academy Award nomination for his first screenplay, the western lampoon Cat Ballou, another Oscar nod for his script of the chain-gang drama Cool Hand Luke and then won the Oscar for his bank heist story Dog Day Afternoon.”

He was “a painter of dazzling geometric abstractions who established a national reputation in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and created a highly acclaimed body of work that celebrates the glories of color in all its variations.”