Category: people

“Stieg was a political animal. He was a fervent advocate of women’s rights. He was an anti-fascist. Despite the runaway success of his thrillers, I have always considered his articles about Swedish and international rightwing extremism more interesting – and more important.”

“Liberalism, at its core, is not so much a doctrine as a disposition, a habit of mind, and it’s compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge. These two currents run through Montaigne’s own sensibility, and to see how distinctive it was, it helps to recall [his place and] times” – 16th-century France, wracked by religious wars.

It is that companionable aspect of Glass that has no doubt been most responsible for the trajectory of his career. One of the founders of hard-core, anti-establishment Minimalism in the 1960s, the 74-year-old composer has entered the mainstream, be it big-box opera, big-budget movies or, the ultimate pop-culture accolade, having your style ripped off by television commercials.

A collection of Mandela’s journals while in prison, private letters and notes he scribbled while seated at high-level meetings are some of the articles that will soon be released on the Internet.

“Where others saw a ‘flowering of the New England mind,’ however, Poe saw something else: ‘the heresy of the didactic.’ From 1845 on, he called our writers ‘Frogpondians,’ perhaps because he regarded them as so many croakers who used literature not to delight and move readers, but to argue and preach.”

“He has a reputation for being difficult and dangerous, his films celebrated for their nihilistic brilliance. Yet despite saying he never smiles, the German director can’t stop laughing at himself – and the comedy in his work.”

“The seven books in his Chronicles of Narnia are being made into movies; The Narnian, a highly readable biography by Alan Jacobs, appeared in 2005; a stage adaptation of his book The Screwtape Letters is touring nationwide; a college is being founded in his honor; and his name is being used to sell Bibles.”

“I had 25 years in a row of unparalleled success, and then I have three years where it all seemed upside down. And I will tell anyone who goes through that — at the time it’s painful and torturous, but it’s so good to come out the other side, because I appreciate what I do.”

“My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés who encouraged me to write from my subconscious and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.”