Category: people

“The rapid-fire irony of Colbert’s show has been known to stymie many a guest, but the 80-year-old Sondheim proved a worthy foil for the comedian’s tongue-in-cheek pomposity.”

“I feel very well. I’m not a sick man. My doctors told me the machine was perfect, it was just low on gas (laughs). The reason I had to leave Chicago when I did was that the car wouldn’t move. I did not stop as a result of the work I did in Chicago. I stopped because I was exhausted from working practically nonstop two to three years before coming to Chicago.”

“A bold appointment aged 28 by the then editor, Tina Brown, in 1996, he has lost none of his freshness in the years since. This may be ascribed, in part, to writing fortnightly rather than, as he would have to do in the daily press, weekly or thrice-weekly – a hamster’s wheel that can grind down even the most gifted of reviewers into somnolent fashioners of clichés.”

From Isherwood’s 1960s diaries: “He hardly ever refers to his career or himself as a famous and successful person and you might be with him for hours and not know what it is he does. Also, he seems equally capable of group fun, clowning, entertaining, getting along with other people, and of entering into a serious one-to-one dialogue with anybody who wants to.”

The pianist and noted teacher at Juilliard was renowned for his interpretations both of Beethoven and of 20th-century music.

“I’m basically singing in a different cavity than before. Singing was easier then. It has taken me longer to become accustomed to sing in this body than I thought it would – to find that support without all the blubber. That’s been challenging, but I wouldn’t go back.”

“Numbers don’t come close to telling the complete story of how Peter C. Marzio expanded the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s collection, but they tell a lot.”

“David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37, used art to keep a grip on the world. He was the quintessential East Village figure, a bit of a loner, a bit crazy, ferociously brilliant and anarchic. He was a self-educated dropout who made art on garbage can lids, who painted inside the West Side piers where men met for anonymous sex, who pressed friends into lookout duty while he covered the walls of New York with graffiti.”

“Mauled by prurient biographers and television documentarists, the most successful composer of operas in the English language stands accused of paedophilia, pro-Sovietism and disloyalty to friends … Yet his midlife letters … reveal quite a different man” – warm, supportive and often gracious.

“A long-lost fragment of manuscript, … written from right to left in Leonardo’s characteristic mirror-writing, was among 5,000 documents donated to the city of Nantes in 1872 by wealthy collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchère, and then left to languish in local archives.”