Category: people

“After one brilliant novel, a novella and a couple of dozen short stories, he turned his back on the cult hunger for his writing and after 1965 refused to publish further. He guarded his privacy so fiercely that he sued to keep his words out of print. Whether a cover-up for writer’s block or the ultimate expression of the alienation that defined his most famous protagonist, Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s stubborn silence only enlarged the cult.”

“When it comes to topics that transfix, death and celebrities are pretty high on the list. Deaths of celebrities has to rate even higher. And deaths of celebrities by their own celebrity hands? A whole other stratosphere. We feel we know these souls so well and, upon hearing of a celebrity suicide, wonder as a collective pop culture-fixated nation what brought them to such a dire final choice.”

“[In] a moment of candor, he confessed to an aide that he had done it all not for glory, patriotism, or ego, but for love: As the world’s most powerful man, he could sleep with any woman he desired.” Alas: “Just as he indifferently bolted down his food, paid no attention to his clothes, and could be self-absorbed and distracted in conversation, Napoleon’s romantic style, admits one otherwise admiring biographer, was ‘anything but endearing’.”

“Although he also wrote distinguished short stories, criticism and social history, … [he] was mainly regarded as one of America’s pre-eminent novelists of manners and a portraitist of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper crust.” Observed Gore Vidal, “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”

“There is almost no literature in any language known to me,” wrote Germaine Greer, “in which we are shown round a functional marriage. We get inside marriages only when they are dysfunctional.” Said Mrs. Brendan Behan, “Jesus protect us from geniuses.”

“Wedged behind an ornate desk cluttered with Soviet-era souvenirs, architectural tchotchkes and ashtrays, [David Sarkisyan] was constantly fulminating against the decrepit state of that city’s landmarks, … making introductions among the architects, historians and socialites who constantly wandered in and out, or pleading over the phone with the few journalists and government officials he felt he could trust.”

“Past statements about composers being ‘useless’ unless they recognize the need for this new musical language have contributed to a view of Mr. Boulez as imperious and dogmatic,” but these days he pours “his energy into bridging the distance between audience and composer and transmitting his passion for new music.”

“‘I turned a page and ‘I’ walked into a restaurant,’ she says. ‘It described my husband too. I said, ‘We just walked into a restaurant in the book that I’m reading!’ I was stunned.’ But popping up as an avatar in random fiction is about as irksome as celebrity gets for her. Indeed Julianne Moore illustrates perfectly Diane von Furstenberg’s theory that stars are only as famous as they want to be.”

“Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain’s ageing population, calling for euthanasia ‘booths’ on street corners where they can terminate their lives with ‘a martini and a medal’.” (As it happens, Amis has a new book to publicize.)

“Although Reginald Robinson — a self-taught pianist — has toiled mightily for all he has achieved, he’ll have to struggle to make a living in ragtime. Yet few are better positioned to do so.”