“I did LSD once, only once … It was a very bad trip — I freaked out and called my parents and tried to explain to my dad what I was feeling, but all he said was, ‘I understand what you’re going through. When I was a teenager I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and I got sick for two days.’ I’m like, ‘Dad, no, this is worse. You don’t understand.’ But they had never had any experience of the drug culture, because they were working so hard all through the 1960s.” —Ben Stiller on not being a hard-core druggie [Female First]
“I started to realize ‘Dickensian’ was a shorthand for ‘I don’t really actually care about the underlying economic dynamic that is creating this nightmare. I don’t want to examine that. I just want some sweet stories about some kids who are poor and are being hurt. I could win a prize in that. Be Dickensian. And I thought it was sort of an affront to Dickens almost. I mean, if Dickens heard it, I think he would have gotten mad.” —David Simon channeling Charles Dickens’s reactions to the state of today’s journalism [PBS]
“I’ve got no musical abilities whatsoever. I sing if I’m listening to music. I sing along with it — I can hit the note if I’ve just heard it. My husband is very musical. He just hates to hear me sing — he shuts me up!” —Helen Mirren on her terrible singing voice [Contact Music]
“The craziest thing was journalists were asking me about it when they hadn’t even listened to it. If you had heard it, it was obviously a hoax! More than anything, it’s amazing that someone can do something so obviously funny, and have the whole world take it the wrong way.” —Beyoncé is still telling journalists how baffled she is by journalists’ interest in that whole singing-hoax incident [NYDN via Contact Music]
“It’s kind of a sexy gastronomic song. I always loved the term ‘Amuse Bouche.’ It was always envisioned as like a lost Prince song. I can imagine Prince doing a song called ‘Amuse Bouche’ that was all about eating and sex.” —Casey Spooner on all that was going on in his head when he titled a song “Amuse Bouche” [Suicide Girls]
“Well I’m not quite sure what you’re supposed to call it. I’ve been resisting calling it a collection of short stories because sometimes novelists do publish collections of short stories, and they’re basically a rag bag of stories they’ve had sitting around for the last 30 years. Whereas this book I actually sat down and wrote from start to finish.” —Kazuo Ishiguro on his new book, something like a collection of short stories [Guardian UK]
