Category: people

“I have done an experiment for the past three years: I got rid of my television. One of the things Orwell talks about in the book ‘1984’ is this thing called ‘the two-minute hate. People go in front of their television screens and they yell at the person they object to politically. I realised I had been doing that for two hours every day during (the administration of George W.) Bush. I said, ‘I’ve got to stop hating.'”

“One of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s” – he was one of the “Angry Young Men” – Arden “was in later life an almost forgotten theatrical figure.”

“A Georgia-born Rabelais, Mr. Crews was renowned for darkly comic, bitingly satirical, grotesquely populated and almost preternaturally violent novels. … [His] novels out-Gothic Southern Gothic by conjuring a world of hard-drinking, punch-throwing, snake-oil-selling characters whose physical, mental, social and sexual deviations render them somehow entirely normal and eminently sympathetic.”

“Unlike almost any other ballet dancer — only Mikhail Baryshnikov, and to some extent Nureyev, come to mind — she not only went on to have a superstar career as an interpreter of the classics but also made an apparently effortless transition into works by contemporary choreographers while remaining a big-name box-office draw.”

“He’s respected by the arts community because he’s one of the only voices in government at any level that seems to be able to articulate the arts case and the argument for public investment in the arts. But the support from the community is wary because of the company he keeps.”

Peter Dinklage turned down many insulting roles on his way to winning the part of Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones, and he’s damn glad. “For fans of the novels, Tyrion is among the most beloved among the scores of kings, warriors, wenches, slaves, queens and monsters that populate George R. R. Martin’s world.”

The Baltimore-based author of books like The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons talks to NPR. “I don’t have that much to say, so I figure about every 35 years will do it, right? It does make me very self conscious when I go back to writing, after I talk about writing.”

The singer, who will play in Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins this autumn and who curated a show that just opened at Tate Liverpool, says she’s trying to find some sort of peace. “What has happened in the past 10 years or so, and what has been my goal for as long as I can remember, is to bring me and Marianne Faithfull into some semblance of harmony. It was her doing drugs and drinking, her inside my head, so it has been tough. The Fabulous Beast, that’s what I call her.”

“While Adrienne Rich, who died on Tuesday at 82, was indeed an inspiring cultural force, she was at bottom a writer of poems. And the defiant political stands for which she became famous are entirely consistent with that identity and its long American heritage. (John Greenleaf Whittier was inveighing against slavery in his poems at considerable personal risk right before the Civil War.) But for Ms. Rich, as for any real poet, the question is always: How do we read her work not as social history, but as poetry?”

With two Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber revivals opening on Broadway this season, the lyricist talks about how he’d like to play Pilate – but how he’s probably a lot more like Judas.