Category: people

“There’s a constant issue of tone: who do you want to read these pieces, and how do you want them to be read? I can write them in a way that is deeply satisfying to a professor of philosophy at Princeton, but we all know if I do that I’ll lose everybody else, and I can do it at the other end of the spectrum for a 10-year-old. You have to pick where you want to be, which for me is somewhere around the middle. Maybe a little to one side of the middle.”

His spokesman said in a statement that the condition was currently in its very early stages.

Keeping a promise to Unicef, Vanessa Redgrave will give a benefit performance of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s play about the grief of losing her husband and daughter. Redgrave lost her own daughter, Natasha Richardson, last spring, shortly before the performance was originally to have taken place.

“I buy from FreshDirect,” Roth says. “I also use Amazon, and I buy a lot of used books from AbeBooks and Alibris. It’s wonderful when you want to find something obscure and there it is for $3.98. It’s the greatest book bazaar that has ever existed.”

“For a speculative-fiction visionary who writes about bioengineered catastrophe, commodified humanity and environmental devastation, Margaret Atwood is one seriously sunny personality.”

“Glancing over the evidence, it’s easy to dismiss him as a sexist purveyor of art-house torture porn … Yet a strong case can be made that von Trier’s patented brand of female trouble is more richly complicated – or, at least, more compelling in its pathologies – than his detractors might admit.”

“The defunct DFS agency bugged the Nobel laureate’s phone and monitored his movements from 1967 after he moved to Mexico with his family. The authorities suspected the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude because of his leftist sympathies and friendship with Fidel Castro.”

“I’ve been lucky with my health,” the 78-year-old author said. “Also, I think we are lucky now in our medical intervention that keeps us going. I have a heart bypass and I’ve just had cancer and things like that are just dealt with now.”

“You don’t meet Bill Murray. You spend some time in his presence, and then try to figure him out when he’s gone.” For instance, he “has no agent or publicist and is contactable only through friends or a freephone answering service. … [And] an entire genus of movie gossip has sprung up around his supposedly cruel behaviour on sets.”

“It was said that she had a thousand lovers in her life, and that she received her most thorough grounding in modern art when she spent a night and a day in bed with Samuel Beckett.”