Category: people

“Crisscrossing the country for 191 days, she gave 74 lectures in 37 cities in 23 states. The visit, highly publicized at the time, is little-known now, even though, as [scholar Wanda] Corn asserts, ‘It is the trip that creates her solid, American celebrity’.”

While the Kardashian klan is pulling down a reported $65 million annually and “Jersey Shore’s” Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino banked as much as $5 million last year alone, lesser players in the reality show game are riding their relative popularity to notable financial gain.

One of a wave of emigré Eastern European artists who revolutionized modern theater in the West in the 1970s and ’80s, Ciulei spent five years as a galvanizing, controversial director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

“At the age of 20 she chose to pursue a career in literature despite her passion and talent for art, yet continued to draw illustrations to accompany her writing for her own pleasure.”

“Then he introduces the needle into that gum. And just presses a little bit of Novocaine, And you don’t really feel it. But now he’s numbing as he goes. He’s numbing as he goes. So that needle could come clear up through your brain and you wouldn’t know it! He numbs as he goes. It’s so fantastic. I love going to the dentist.”

“Shakespeare’s name is being removed from signs in Warwickshire in a campaign against a new film which questions whether he wrote his plays.”

“Can we even be certain of Charles Dickens? How can a mere hack have known so much of the human condition? We must be constantly vigilant, upturning every literary stone, relentlessly pursuing the truth – particularly when there’s not the slightest chance of ever discovering it.”

“Dickinson discussed baking in many of her letters – evincing both her trademark wit and a zest for life that belies the common image of her as a depressed figure. … [She] was known to lower a basket full of cakes from the window of the home she rarely left to crowds of expectant children on the street below.”

“We’re living in too morbid an age, growing grotesquely morbid. I’m fed up with it as a smoker, utterly fed up with what’s been going on about it. What was I saying just a minute ago? ‘Birth, copulation, death/When you get down to brass tacks, that’s all the facts.”

“He would always ask you to do impossible things. And you felt compelled to try to do it. … People would figure out how to do it, or some facsimile of it. And it was still extraordinary, even if it wasn’t what it originally was supposed to be.”