Curtis: "I prefer to think of everyone as an individual."
Curtis: "I like to think that [Joy Division doesn't] belong to any category."
Curtis: "If I'm listening to music it tends to be the persons attitude towards the music they're making that influences me more than the actual music that's played."
Michael Sweeney: "He was kind, intelligent and someone with real feelings."
Len Brown: "Tributes paint Curtis as a lost prophet; as [someone] more sensitive, braver, and perhaps closer to God or godlessness than the rest of us; as if he'd held up his cracked mirror to show us how hopeless, meaningless and inhuman our world had become."
Apple: "It brings a certain satisfaction to write down what you have inside and music is the vehicle for that."
Apple: "I pay attention a lot to how I feel about things and when you pay attention to how you feel [and] think about things ... you learn a lot about yourself and when you know yourself, you know a lot."
Apple: “[I didn’t like the fact that representatives from Sony music wanted to okay my tracks because] then they’re in on the songwriting. And if I start letting that happen, then I’m dead!”
Rolling Stone: "Fiona Apple has curious, intense faith in the truth. In her music, she believes that if she is honest, what she creates cannot be without worth."
DiCaprio: "I was always the kid in school who tried to get attention. ... I'd do little unexpected performances."
DiCaprio: "School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn."
DiCaprio: "I want to be a jerk like the rest of my friends ... but I just can't."
Stefani: "Every night's different. You can't tell if it's gonna be a good show or a bad show. That's what's kind of exciting, I guess, about it. You never know, [you just] get up there [on stage] and see what happens."
Stefani: "I don't have a plan; it's been basically chasing dangling carrots everywhere I look.”
Stefani: “I always hate talking about fashion. … To me, fashion is something you don't talk about, it's something you do. [And something] you wear and you look at."
USA Today: "[She has] youthful enthusiasm [and] breathless energy."
White: "The way I handle things [is] everything is on a case-by-case basis and [I'll] deal with stuff as it comes."
White: “I love to win.”
Trump: "There's nobody like this guy, I'm telling you. ... He could do anything. He is so smart, so tough, so cunning."
Rolling Stone: "He’s taken mixed martial arts, a sport that was essentially moribund seven years ago ... and turned it into a moneymaking, crowd-frazzling sensation ... He accomplished this by using various business-savvy stratagems and dodges. ... How he did it really is by the force of his own multifaceted personality. At 38, he is ... charming, ambitious, [and] cunning.”
Gregg Doyel: "He's charming, persistent, persuasive and magnetic.”
Chuck Mindenhall: "He doesn’t always tell the truth, but somehow — through audacity and red-faced guile — White keeps pushing this sport into bigger and broader realms ... and upping his own ante."
Lorenzo Fertitta: "[Getting into the UFC] I figured that if I went out and hired a Harvard MBA, we'd probably [go] out of business. ... [The reason I hired Dana White was because] we needed somebody that was street smart."
Lorenzo Fertitta: "Dana has no filter. ... Dana is all about saying exactly what's on his mind."
Lorenzo Fertitta: "Dana is a great promoter."
Biden: "I have found that [with] most people, candor generates trust. ... [This approach] has always worked for me."
Biden: "[Obama and I] kind of balance each other. ... [I am someone who will] hug [and] touch [people] ... whereas he is not emotive that way. That's why we make such a good team."
Bob Woodward: "Around the White House, Biden was known as 'the [Republican] whisperer': The person who knew the right combination of sympathy and gentleness - never force - needed to work with the minority."
The Atlantic: “Though plenty smart, Biden is not an intellectual. He makes few references to books and learned influences in his speeches and autobiography, and he displays little interest in theory. An indifferent student at the University of Delaware and Syracuse University College of Law—he describes the latter as 'boring'—Biden got by with prodigious cramming sessions. Today, by contrast, he is described by Tony Blinken, Biden’s national-security adviser, as a compulsive studier who likes to be overbriefed."
The Atlantic: “The guideposts in Biden’s political landscape are often not ideas, but people. Many of the world leaders with whom the United States has business are men and women he has known for years, even decades. In fall 2009, for example, after Obama had decided to abandon plans to build land-based missile defenses in eastern Europe—a move interpreted as a concession to Moscow—the White House sent Biden on a three-day swing through Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic to reassure the leaders of those countries that their security would not be compromised. Biden had mastered the details of the issue—the virtues of sea-based anti-missile technology versus land-based, and so on—but his most important asset was that he knew many of the leaders personally.”
The Atlantic: “It’s clear that Biden feels he has the superior people skills—not that he puts it that way. He says the skill set he brings is ‘different,’ but it’s a difference he values, and one that he sees as part of his contribution to the administration. … ‘I’m a little more Irish. I’m more old-school.'"
The Atlantic: “In his personal life, Biden could hardly be more traditional. In the scruffy ’60s, when so many young men of his generation went unkempt as a social and political statement, Biden dressed up for class in college, sometimes wearing a tie. He says his first wife, Neilia, described him as ‘the most socially conservative man she had ever known.’”
Howard Fineman: “Biden is not an academic, he's not a theoretical thinker, he's a great street pol."
Hefner: “It's always been [the] romantic [aspects] that's really turned me. … And the remarkable thing, and for that I'm really grateful, [is that] I am as romantic a pushover today as I was when I was a kid, and I'm glad."
Hefner: "I withdrew into ... a lot of my own dreams and fantasies, and that's what led me to … the creative arts.”
Hefner: “I was tremendously influenced by movies and by the romantic songs of the time, and I think that in a very real way I escaped into, in childhood, romantic dreams and fantasies as a kind of the equivalent of love. And I think most of my life has been a search and a quest for that perfect world that was described in the films and songs."
Rolling Stone: “For the past 18 months, I’ve been studying the guy, mostly up close and personal. … The Hugh Hefner I found is more interesting than [his image], more cautious, more human. He’s fragile, romantic and full of ideals. He has given his life for a cause.”
Steven Watts: “He tended to be reserved in formal situations at school or home. ... Absorbed in his imagination, he often neglected his studies. ... Indeed, throughout childhood Hefner created vivid fantasy worlds in which he immersed himself, a trait that would prove to be lifelong. The boy who wouldn’t answer the telephone or venture alone to the dentist’s office a few streets away preferred to inhabit a reality he had created.”
Steven Watts: "[His mother] Grace was repeatedly struck by Hugh’s insular creativity. 'As a child, he found it very difficult to make new friends. When he was in school, he was a dreamer, and sort of lived his own life in his own mind,' she observed. 'I would ask him who some of his classmates were, and he wouldn’t know the names of very many of them. ... You couldn’t always tell what was making Hugh feel unhappy, because he was very much a loner,' a baffled Grace admitted. 'He always lived in a fantasy world.' ... Often shy and insecure with other people, the boy did not like venturing out. ... Even as a kid, noted [his brother Keith], Hugh wanted 'his world to stay exactly as he made it, and doesn’t want to go anywhere else where that isn’t the reality.'"
Clinton: "My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out, because as we practiced [my inaugural speech] between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day, I was still changing it."
Bob Woodward: "Clinton ... had an unusually broad national network of political, media, and academic friends, and displayed an obvious fascination with ideas."
Steven J. Rubenzer: "He liked pondering ideas and theories."
Steven J. Rubenzer: "Clinton was very talkative, wordy, and verbose."
Bob Woodward: "Clinton would not fully commit to run. ... He set August as a personal deadline for a final decision, but the deadline slipped. Clinton had no campaign manager and not much organization. He appeared locked in a perpetual debate and argument with himself and with dozens of friends and advisers. His thinking never seemed to go in a straight line. He was unable to bring his deliberations to any resolution."
Bob Woodard: “He could 'correlate' various ideas and issues. In many respects, Clinton was well suited to the presidency. He had a superior, inquisitive mind, especially when compared to Reagan, and was capable of genuine vision, especially when compared to Bush. But the very discord or range of opinion that Clinton craved in making his decisions often got him bogged down. Bentsen once described Clinton as the 'meetingest' fellow he’d ever seen. The very fact [is] that he wanted debate. ... The war for Clinton’s soul, that great struggle over which ideas and approach to use to guide the nation, continued unabated."
Bob Woodward: "Paster was … amazed at Clinton’s willingness to allow these extended debates where they essentially talked to death the inevitable. Clinton was always trying to pick out a new course, move the debate or the policy slightly. The dynamic had a pattern. Clinton, unaccepting of the conventional wisdom, especially about Congress, would test the edges of what was possible, stretching the boundaries of the Washington and congressional playing field."
The Washington Post: "French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were quoted by aides as saying they could not believe Clinton wanted to affix his name to [his initiative]. Calling the plan 'novel, bizarre and unprecedented,' spokesman Jean Musitelli said Mitterrand judged it to be 'something like a UFO.'"
Haynes Johnson: "Clinton likes to quote Machiavelli."
Steven M. Gillon: "He enjoyed talking to everyone, but had a special affinity for reaching out to people who were different, or somehow out of the mainstream."
Walter Isaacson: "The combination of analytic and emotional intelligence that made him a great politician now makes him a compelling raconteur."
Steven J. Rubenzer: "[Bill Clinton and George Washington] are nearly opposite in their ... personalities."
Steven J. Rubenzer: "Clinton was much more prone to value openmindedness over devotions to principles and ideals."
Smith: “What I have that other people do not have is a … raw animal drive.”
Smith: “I have to be moving toward perfection. [I] don’t have to achieve it, but [I] do have to be moving toward it.”
Smith: “I’m [only] accommodating to people because I know even the slightest bump is going to be magnified tenfold.”
The Guardian: “[He has an] ability to charm his way out of any given situation.”
Smith: “I’m actually very good at being mean, very skilled at finding your weakest spot and ramming an ice pick into it. I’m a laser-guided, intergalactic, space-molecular, air-dispersing module for finding that particular bull’s eye. … But I can be deadly.”
Smith: "The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school. Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life."
Smith: "[Don't] make a situation more complex than it has to be."
Reader's Digest: "[He is] a man who can never seem to slow down."