Character Study

Susie Essman on her famously self-confident alter-ego: "Susie Greene thinks she is drop-dead gorgeous and everything she chooses to put on is drop-dead gorgeous. Imagine being like that." [NYT]

Susie Essman on her famously self-confident alter-ego: "Susie Greene thinks she is drop-dead gorgeous and everything she chooses to put on is drop-dead gorgeous. Imagine being like that." [NYT]

Liv Ullmann: "On [Ingmar Bergman]'s sets there was so much joking around. We told each other everything about ourselves. I have a picture from that time and Ingmar has written on it, ‘Here we are playing again.'" [W]
Francine Prose, on Anne Frank: The Book, the Life and the Afterlife: " Teenaged girls are the most maligned, undervalued portion of the population, as though they're all gossip girls. They can be very smart and attuned to the world." [WSJ]
"For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull," - Horst Ratjen, speaking in 1957 of posing as female jumper on the 1936 German Olympic team. [BBC]
Sommelier Emily Wines: "Never be ashamed of your wine choices...I'm the one who once poured a nearly empty bottle of one of my favorite wines into little travel-size shampoo bottles so I could finish it off during a trip." [NYT]
Hugo Lindgren: "Who needs the GDP?...The indicator I prefer is the Hot Waitress Index: The hotter the waitresses, the weaker the economy." Because in this economy, you see, even the hot are reduced to what they can get. [New York]
Amanda Marcotte: "On one hand, [asking why women don't watch more porn]'s like asking why men don't read more romance novels. You can usually tell when you're in the intended audience, you know. Women aren't stupid." [Pandagon]
Matt Weiner: "I fought AMC cutting two minutes of [Mad Men.] I love advertising. I write about advertising... But an extra ad is a very limited financial reward for altering a show that put AMC on the map." [GQ]
"I was picking up a bunch of magazines...and I realized that even after reading all these magazines front to back I still felt unfulfilled...Where were the real women who were doing important things who weren't celebrities?" -Rachelle Gauthier, Vain. [MediaBistro]
"There's a huge resistance in thinking about animals as having emotions, feelings, by anyone involved in invasive research...whether it's putting animals in cages and experimenting on them, or the meat industry. It's much easier to be nasty."-Jane Goodall [LAT]
Cake-artist Kristin Peres: "I spent far too long in a job I didn't love because I thought I couldn't do this for a living...I have learned that you can make anything work if you want it bad enough." [Shameless]

Raina Kelley: "It was page after page about the dangers of lead, arsenic, plastics, and pesticides...It should have been titled Silly Mamas: Your Home Will Kill Your Baby...the only point was to scare the bejeezus out of me." [Newsweek]
Gerontologist Emma Shulman: "I smoked. Seventy-something years. I just quit three months ago...cold turkey. I quit because I got a bronchial infection. I like red wine, a glass with dinner...I used to drink Scotch. I was a Scotch maniac." [NYT]
Curtis Sittenfeld: "For naming characters, I love the Social Security Administration's most popular baby names site." [New York Times]