Jonathan Cott
Born
December 24, 1942
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Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
27 editions
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published
1978
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Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono
18 editions
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published
2013
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Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein
5 editions
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published
2012
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The Search for Omm Sety
by
9 editions
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published
1987
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There's a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak
3 editions
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published
2017
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Conversations with Glenn Gould
by
10 editions
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published
1984
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The Essential Interviews
by
10 editions
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published
2006
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The Ballad of John and Yoko
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Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn
3 editions
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published
1991
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Beyond the Looking Glass: Extraordinary Works of Fairy Tale & Fantasy
by
9 editions
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published
1973
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“There's a theme that appears in much of your work," I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, "and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen]."
"Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…"
"What is this one obsession?"
"I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it."
"There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'"
"Inside the rain?"
"When it's raining outside," I explain, "I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well."
"It's strange you say that," Maurice answers, "because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue…”
― Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature
"Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…"
"What is this one obsession?"
"I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it."
"There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'"
"Inside the rain?"
"When it's raining outside," I explain, "I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well."
"It's strange you say that," Maurice answers, "because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue…”
― Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature
“So there I am standing in the wings. All atremble with these two little pills in my pocket … And I took them out and looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to do this on my own. I am not going to take any pills. I don’t want any aid from anybody but God,’ and I just flung them across the entire backstage and strode out, and that’s the last thing I remember until the end of the concert when I saw the entire audience there, standing and cheering and screaming. But from the time of my entrance until the time of my last exit I remember nothing. There’s nothing I can tell you. It was all a dream.”
― Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein
― Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein
“Sometime between four o’clock and dawn, Bernstein returned home with a hangover. At nine in the morning, he was awakened by a phone call from the Philharmonic’s associate manager who told him, “Well, this is it. You have to conduct at three o’clock. No chance of a rehearsal. You will report at a quarter of three backstage.”
― Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein
― Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein
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