Category: people

“It’s not a particular talent that I have, but a great love – I’m strictly like a weekend golfer or something. I don’t kid myself – people come and see me because they’ve seen my movies. I am surrounded by good musicians and I do my best, but it’s strictly enthusiasm.”

“[He] embodied postwar ingenuity and optimism in a series of inexpensive beach houses in whimsical shapes … [and] helped bring modernism to the masses with prefabricated cottages sold at Macy’s.”

“Fred the pigeon, whose hobby was dive-bombing cops and dropping unwanted gifts on tourists at the 9/11 Memorial, has been taken in by an opera singer who is teaching him to change his tune and fly right.”

“While the whole ‘who’s a genius’ debate is, in general, fraught and unwinnable, since genius itself is always going to be ill-defined, in the case of Steve Jobs it is even more fraught and even more unwinnable. In part, this is because the tech world, where most of us reside simply by owning cell phones and using computers, is not unlike the sports world or the political world: it likes a good rivalry.”

“Tintin himself has no origin. He simply exists, with no ties to past or future generations, a fate that his creator might have wished for himself. The Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Hergé … showed little taste for the spotlight, and still less for those who wished to poke into his past.”

“[He] almost singlehandedly gave automotive metal a place in the history of sculpture, smashing and twisting together a poetic fusion of Abstract Expressionism and Pop from fenders, fins, bumpers and hoods.”

“[A] former associate of modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, [he] bought and renovated the rundown Biltmore Hotel with a business partner, reviving interest in downtown L.A. and helping spark its revitalization.”

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that the 12th-century Benedictine nun – a composer, writer, philosopher, medical practitioner and latter-day feminist/New Age icon – will be recognized as a saint and Doctor of the Church in September 2012.

“[On a movie set,] when you’re the star, you end up just sitting around a lot. … So when you see James’s character with his arm trapped under a rock in 127 Hours, what you don’t see is that there was an assigned reading under the rock with it.”

With Vaclav Havel, the Czech author and playwright, it is impossible to separate the artist’s politics from the politician’s art. He was both a witness and a communicant, repeatedly exploring, in the words of the title of one of his essays, “the power of the powerless.”