Sunday, June 24, 2012

Mark Andrews

There are no villains in our world, really. Most of our lives are filled with, "I've caused the problem myself. Why did I cause the problem?" It's our own agendas. It's our own vanity. It's our pride. It's our envy, all those things.

The one thing I love about telling stories is, we spend our whole lives going in and out of being better or worse, in our own character. But in a movie, the character transforms into the best they're going to be. So you take a whole life, what we live, that we have to constantly work at, and we shove it down into 80 minutes so we can see what this person goes through. We can see the human condition at high speed. That creates more intensity and more stakes in the story, but what we get out of that is like [claps], "That person overcame everything, and boy, that's inspirational. That's what I'm going to do." It empowers us.

--director of Pixar's Brave in an interview. The Onion's A.V. Club, June 21, 2012, p. 26.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Stanley Plumly

This was the fall, October, when Ohio,
like almost every other part of the country,
is beginning to be mortally beautiful,
the great old hardwoods letting go
their various scarlet, yellow,
and leopard-spotted leaves one by one. 

--from "Glenn Gould" (2012)

Monday, June 11, 2012

Richard Strauss

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Linda Ellerbee

He was generous with his affection, given to great, awkward, engulfing hugs, and I can remember so clearly the smell of his hugs, all starched shirt, tobacco, Old Spice and Cutty Sark. Sometimes I think I've never been properly hugged since.

From Move On

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Tom Waits

Go out there and take the world by the tail, pull it down, wrap it around and put it in your pocket.