June 2007
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"What would it be like, as a kid, to first encounter comics in a format that suggests that comics are actually important? An entire generation of children has already grown up without the memory of clawing through the sports pages to soak, junkie-like, in the hypnotic lameness that was Dick Tracy or Family Circus, now that the daily paper has bit the dust in most households. The jumbled newsstand racks and musty "Everything in this Box is a Quarter" boxes have long-since morphed into the pseudo-Victorian charms of Barnes and Noble, and hermetically sealed comics shops that sell spendy hardcover omnibuses and Franklin Mint-type statues of the Sandman while giving actual children the fisheye."
by
Heather Smith
"The thing is, I’m not a political writer. I’m not a militante, but those who absolutely refuse to give up writing against the [Iranian] government, they have difficulty. If you read my stories, I write about problems of exile, I write about problems inside, but I don’t attack religion. Even before, during the [reign of the] Shah, I didn’t believe in social or political issues for a novel. For me, to go into the inner life of human beings is more important, to discover myself, to discover the other one, and by discovering the other one, discovering myself. But still I have difficulties publishing because the government as a whole is against me. My position is very bad. First of all I’m a woman. I’m divorced. I live in France and I come from a very big, famous family."
by
Michelle Risley
"Always when one talks about one’s own perceptions there is this risk of adoring one’s own perceptions, which is embarrassing (I’m thinking of the self-loving tone in the voice some people get when they talk to Teri Gross on “Fresh Air”) but that is not the main problem with it; that adoration has to have a thumb pushing it down hard; it is not to be borne; and it also won’t go away, it keeps rising up."
by
Zoe Ward
"We started Impetus because we saw a gap existing in between the work being published by commercial houses and other independents. We all know that the larger houses (Random House, etc.) have become exceedingly commercial in the past years with The Da Vinci Code and whatnot and all the independents that have popped up in order to combat that commercialization have definitely created alternative spaces for more experimental/avant-garde work to exist in."
by
Ned Vizzini
"It’s very not cool in my creative training to have a muse. It’s just so square and ridiculous. There’s something about her fundamentally as an historical figure that I am attracted to and does inspire me, but I think she’s kind of been swept under the rug in a lot of ways. Why do we not know more about this woman? She was brilliant, she published all these books, and she produced incredible, really brilliant, naïve paintings. Why was there this concerted effort to keep [Nahui Olin] out of history?"
by
John Zuarino
"As Kinsley would have it, Hitchens reveals to us litmus tests for the world’s religions and for God’s existence itself, all for the price of a single volume. Is this -- Hitchens's book, Kinsley's book review -- really what passes for public intellectualism on religion in the U.S. today?"
by
Barbara J. King
"I am one of those people who actually think that pretty much everything is creative. I am the daughter of scientists and have a great many friends who do a plethora of things, not just the arts, although I do have a lot of those. I think that everybody can live creatively and I don't see any difference between say, math and ballet."
by
Colleen Mondor
"I've always been fascinated by the Kennedy presidency ever since I watched his Inaugural Address on television when I was 13-years old. From that moment on, I read everything about him that I could lay my hands on. I focused on his friendship with Lem Billings because I had come across his name in various JFK books. But there was little about Lem in the various books and yet his role in JFK's life seemed important. I was curious."
by
Stephanie Merchant
