Category: people

“‘It was great to be in rooms without people, like a meditation of sorts,’ she says. ‘I think of the great society portrait painter Wright of Derby who at the end of his life finished up painting cow pastures because he’d just had it with people. I do think we all head there.'”

“For all his scavenger skills,[Todd] Barton hopes he doesn’t distract audiences. ‘I don’t want you going out humming tunes, because then I’ve brought too much attention to myself,’ he says. ‘I’m vodka. I enhance whatever you put with me. If you put lemons in vodka you get essence of lemon. If you put a play in me, I enhance the story, propel the plot.'”

“On the flight were artists, company leaders, the first woman elected to the city’s school board and other leaders. Among the sights on their packed agenda were the Louvre in Paris, the Coliseum in Rome and London Bridge. Out of the city’s grief grew a sense that something needed to be done to memorialize them, to improve on its tiny art museum in an old house and struggling art school.”

“When the police interrogate me,” he says, “they say I am a pawn of the West. They say they only buy my work because they want to give me money. And they say I am trying to use politics to promote myself and become more famous. And there is some truth here. But the police forget what the purpose of all this fame and status is. I do not need it personally. They never understand the content of my message.”

Petroc Trelawny, a presenter on BBC Radio 3, was arrested last week for allegedly working in Zimbabwe without an employment permit. (He was emceeing a music festival on a volunteer basis.) A judge dropped all charges on Monday, but immigration officials are refusing to return Trelawny’s passport and want to try him for violating the terms of his tourist visa.

“The real part of theater is being onstage with your fellow actors. The fake part is the glitter of it — that’s got nothing to do with the work of show business. Otherwise, it can do real head tricks — you start believing your publicity.”

Over a seventy-year career, “the blind folk singer and guitarist whose dazzling string work and homespun stage manner transported concert audiences … influenced such diverse musicians as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Clarence White of the Byrds, the innovative acoustic picker Leo Kottke and bluegrass multi-instrumentalist Ricky Skaggs.”

“For women, it is the beginning of dying. … [For] me, [it] makes you feel slightly dead, so you have to start using the other things – using your mind more, read more, you have to be more enlightened, you have to take on new things, think of new ideas, discover new things, start looking at the stars, understand astronomy.”

“One of the recurring themes of Amis’s pronouncements over the past few years has been a palpable disenchantment with England and English life: the ‘skanky town’ malice of London’s literary world; his bald declaration to a French newspaper that he would ‘prefer not to be English’; the sense that his homeland is a busted flush; the fact that his new book, Lionel Asbo, is a satire on the shallowness and vulgarity of celebrity-obsessed Britain. All of this may or may not be true, but it is not the reason he has decamped to America.”

“I tried to explain to them that I’m artist and expressing myself is my job, my duty. That communicating is very important for me.” It wasn’t an argument that impressed the security men. “They kept telling me that I’m part of a Western strategy to change China.”