Top 5: LXV
- William J. Simmons on photography: "I sometimes imagine that we photograph people we love differently, or perhaps the photograph manifests this love formally in the chemical reactions that produce it. This is magic, which has always been the imaginary role of photography." (From his introduction to a 2018 interview with Catherine Opie in BOMB)
- Joan Didion on self-respect: "In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues." (From her 1961 Vogue essay)
- Tarell Alvin McCraney on theater: "It’s not that people don’t care about live performance or live storytelling or narratives that people can go and engage with, it’s that we have commodified it in a way that now means we can only think of 'theater' in this very tight, narrow view. We say, 'This is what qualifies as theater,' when in truth, you go across the plains of America and you can witness all manner and all variety of theater. You see all the different things that it can mean." (From a 2018 interview in The Creative Independent)
- Bob Dylan on reading: "I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally." (From his 2017 Nobel Prize acceptance speech)
- Atul Gawande on blame: "When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you. When people discover that they can numb negative feelings with alcohol or drugs, only to find that addiction has made them even more powerless, it seems to confirm that they are to blame. We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest." (From his March 16 New Yorker article on Anne Case and Angus Deaton's Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism)