Blog

David Remnick

“I do love the activity of writing, which is very different from editing. Editing is a social thing that you get right or you get wrong. It’s an...

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Willem Dafoe

“Acting is about having something happen to you, transparently enough that the audience can hopefully have a flavor of that experience. It’s why I...

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Maria Ressa

“Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit, every law, every safeguard, every institution, every story. You must know how dangerous...

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Benny Safdie

“Performance is fleeting. I like acting, and part of what I love about directing is that I love performance. There’s something incredible about...

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Brit Marling

“I still really believe in storytelling. In some ways, stories are more important now than ever before because it takes so much for our values to...

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Ziwe

“My comedy and work build on each other; what I do in live shows builds on how I would treat an interview. I’m working through what my art looks like...

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Marina Abramović

“Performance art has this incredible power of realization of so many things. It is difficult to maintain because it is immaterial; it is time-based...

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Michael Lewis

“It’s unsettling and revealing when you have a character who’s devoid of feeling, like Sam Bankman-Fried, how much you lose when you try to strip...

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Weyes Blood

“When there’s friction in the world, it’s in that state that songs come out. The art of music is to take things that feel meaningless or hopeless and...

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George Saunders

“Writing offers a falling away of something; a loss of judgment, a quieting of rumination. It’s hard to make the case for the value of astonishment...

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Hua Hsu

“When I was in my teens and twenties, I aspired to write these polemical truths. Then, in my thirties and forties, when I was working on Stay True, I...

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Zadie Smith

“When you’re young, you come to destroy the generation above. I’m used to being the destroyer, and now I’m here to be destroyed. What I do notice...

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Sandra Cisneros

“When you’re a writer, you live in dreamtime. It’s kind of like a kite. You begin with your own story, and the higher it goes, it starts to take off...

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David Byrne

“In musical collaboration, you can kind of get outside of yourself. Being in a band, performing— in all those things, you have to collaborate and...

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Matt Belloni

“Entertainment as a business does not work unless we have a viable career path for writers and actors. It can’t just be a gig economy where...

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Laufey

“My kind of guiding light as a musician is to keep jazz traditions alive and bring them to a new audience. When I was starting out, I was like, I’m a...

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Sam Sanders

“I think that so often, when you enter journalism or creative fields, you kind of get the message that you’re allowed to be yourself— to a...

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Alana Haim

“It makes me emotional—how rich my life is with such amazing people. I’m so grateful to have met Paul and Cooper. Like, look at this thing we...

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