Category: people

“In a way I’m very lucky. I play with the world’s best musicians and that’s what really matters to me. I can be super-famous, but it doesn’t mean anything. Working in the best cultural capitals with the best musicians is what matters to me the most because that way I always have the chance to stay at a good performance level.”

“More than any other artist, Leonardo has a cult following. He is not merely a figure of prodigal creativity, he is a source of myths, legends, untruths, half-truths and baffling conspiracies, the inspiration for an ocean of pseudo-science and mumbo-jumbo. Yet strangely, for most of history, Leonardo was best known not as a helicopter pioneer, a cross-dresser, a specialist in military fortifications or a painter with a nice facility at sultry, androgynous portraits, but as the author of The Treatise on Painting, an attempt to make art systematic, even scientific.”

“He has had one of the most dazzling careers of any vocalist in the history of modern opera and followed it with an equally impressive turn as the director of some of the world’s greatest opera companies.”

“Long considered the most eminent piano trio in the world, the Beaux Arts was founded in 1955 by Mr. Greenhouse, the violinist Daniel Guilet and the pianist Menahem Pressler. It was known for its refined musicality and remarkable continuity of personnel: Mr. Greenhouse, for instance, played with the group for 32 years until retiring in 1987.”

“A lot of work went into getting the show to this point, over 30-some years, and why should one waste all of that work simply because one person, the weak link, the host, decides to go off and sail the Caribbean, or go off and write his memoirs that nobody would particularly want to read, why should this come to an end? And the answer is that it shouldn’t, at least without a good fight.”

“Ai’s politically confrontational work is something of an outlier in China, where most high-profile artists steer clear of explicitly political material. But he’s not the only one who has pushed the boundaries with his work – and paid the price.”

Between 2000 and 2008, Gingrich wrote 156 reviews of books he liked on Amazon.com. “If you read his entire collected Amazonian oeuvre, you can watch as an easily entertained quantum physics [and spy-thriller] junkie slowly realizes that he needs to get back into politics and set the rest of us straight – one last time.”

“His first teacher humiliated him. ‘She fired me,’ says Lang Lang simply, ‘because she thought I had no talent.’ There were blazing rows with his father, who told him he was lazy. Unable to stand it, the boy smashed his hands against the wall. But then he found a teacher who gave him hope.”

“Manuel Araya, Neruda’s secretary, personal assistant and driver, has alleged in recent interviews that the poet was assassinated by the new military regime, which feared he would go into exile as a high-profile dissident.”

She was “a writer and editor who in two groundbreaking books – Words and Women and The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing – brought attention to the sexual discrimination embedded in ordinary English usage.”