Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

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Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

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The bestselling author, 40, on avoiding Twitter, the anxieties of parenthood and the memory of a childhood accident that’s shaped his life

Andrew Hankinson

 13 May 2017 14.00 BST

As a child I was encouraged to participate in adult conversations, encouraged to go out into the world and assume a role that runs the risk of making a kid very annoying. Because my brothers are also writers, there’s an assumption it was a kind of intellectual home. I don’t know that it was. Did we have more books than my friends? Probably not. Did we talk about literature? No.

This much I know / Wilbur Smith / ‘Poor Cecil the lion was going downhill fast – that dentist probably did his pride a favour’

 

Wilbur Smith

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Wilbur Smith: ‘Poor Cecil the lion was going downhill fast – that dentist probably did his pride a favour’

The novelist, 82, on coming up against death, being in awe of girls, and getting rid of his bad guys

Tim Adams
Saturday 3 October 2015

I wait for stories to come. It’s like hunting at a waterhole. You sit there and wait and wait for the game to appear.

I have homes in different places: London, Cape Town. I follow the sun. I am a bird of passage.

This much I Know /Tom Jones / ‘The knicker throwing started in the Copacabana in New York in 1968’

 

Sir Tom Jones: ‘The plan is very much for me to be on stage in 10 years’ time, doing Sex Bomb.’ 
Photograph: Rick Guest

THIS MUCH I KNOW

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Sir Tom Jones: ‘The knicker throwing started in the Copacabana in New York in 1968’

The singer, 80, on enthusiastic audiences, singing Sex Bomb at 90, meeting a young Michael Jackson and losing the love of his life

Nick McGrath

Saturday 3 April 2021

I’ve been singing since I was a kid growing up in Pontypridd in South Wales. I would sing in school. I would sing in chapel. Any chance I got to get up and sing, I took it.

This much I know /Joan Bakewell / I wasn’t insulted by the ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ label

 

Joan Bakewell

This much I know

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Joan Bakewell: I wasn’t insulted by the ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ label

The broadcaster, 83, on the swinging 60s, the 10 comandments and hanging out with Harold Pinter

My hero / Joan Bakewell by Kirsty Wark

Joanne O'Connor
Saturday 8 October 2016

The war shaped me. I’m still very thrifty – I save string and elastic bands – and I’m hugely patriotic, although not in a Ukip way. It made me realise that you can’t hang around. You’ve got to get as much satisfaction out of life as you can because you might be bombed tomorrow.

This much I know / Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon at home in Dorset. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Fay Weldon

Interview by Lucy Siegle
Sun 30 Aug 2009 00.01 BST

The binge drinkers will grow up to be wives and mothers. If you see enough pictures of young girls drinking outside pubs and falling over, you decide young women are all like that and despise them. But they're all right and they will be all right.

I find the phrase "organised criminals" comforting. When I hear it I thank Gosomebody, somewhere knows what they're doing and has a plan.

This much I Know / David Sedaris / Feeling like an alien is interesting

David Sedaris

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David Sedaris, humourist, 51, London

Legends of the fall / The 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

Interview by Stuart Husband

Sunday 28 September 2008

I

'm a complete Luddite. I only saw the internet for the first time last September, and I finally got email in June. To me, the computer is a typewriter that glows. I only type with one finger. And I still don't have a cellphone. People who are coming to dinner tend to call to say they're 10 minutes away. I really don't care. When they arrive, they can knock on the door.

‘Going on stage and being in the public eye ended my shyness’: Bob Mortimer. Photograph: Richard Grassie

This much I know

Life and style

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Bob Mortimer: ‘I’m comfortable with getting older, but I try not to look in the mirror’

The comedian, 62, on growing up shy in Middlesbrough, losing his dad, meeting Vic Reeves, and the deep contentment of fishing

Katherine Hassell
Sat 9 Oct 2021 14.00 BST

I was quite a shy boy. Growing up in Middlesbrough, I felt a bit of an outsider. My three elder brothers are funny and boisterous and I was in awe of them. I felt like an appendage. It’s probably the curse of being a younger kid. I’ve seen some become the loudest because they fight for their place, and others retreat to the fringes. I was in the latter group.

This much I know / Gloria Steinem/ ‘Go too far, or you’re not going far enough’

‘I’m so excited by young women now’: Gloria Steinem at her apartment in New York. 
Photograph: Christopher Lane/The Observer

THIS MUCH I KNOW

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Gloria Steinem: ‘Go too far, or you’re not going far enough’

The feminist activist, 86, on worldwide sisterhood, Spaceship Earth, sexual harrassment in the 1970s and being bitten by rats

Britt Collins

Saturday 4 July 2020

One of my lowest points was waking up on a summer night with a pool of blood on the floor. My hand had been extended over the bed and I’d been bitten by a rat. My mother got me to a local hospital for a tetanus shot, but when we came home the pool of blood had been licked up. I remember longing for a cage to sleep in. I say this because in cities around the world, there are people living with the same fear right now.

The boys in my neighbourhood dreamed of getting out through sports, but the only place I saw women leading free lives was in the movies. So I had the dream of becoming a dancer and literally dancing my way into a better life and world. In high school, I answered an ad and became a magician’s assistant. Briefly, because he left town with the money he was supposed to pay me and a young couple who sang with his act.

The women’s movement feels like a big chosen family. From New York to New Delhi, I can find women friends I trust as family. We are communal animals, so it’s important to have the support of others: friends, colleagues, lovers for company and laughter, a rescuer if I’m in trouble, a will to help if they need it.

I’m so excited by young women now. Remember, I was a 50s person, so I feel as if I just had to wait for some of my friends to be born. We’ve always been accused of “going too far”. That’s why Robin Morgan wrote a brilliant book with that title. Unless you’re accused of that, you haven’t gone far enough!

What we now call the #MeToo movement started in the early 1970s, when women college students first coined the term “sexual harassment” to describe what happened to them on summer jobs. Then the great legal mind, Catharine MacKinnon, wrote this into sex discrimination law. Several cases were brought, all by black women, and there were the Anita Hill hearings that educated the nation. Recently, women have begun to feel OK about coming forward to say that our bodies belong to ourselves. We have yet to explain that there’s no democracy without power over our own bodies.

Seeing New York shut down is sad and frightening, yet there’s also a new sense of concern and connection between and among us. People hang out of their windows to sing and shout together, and even on television you see news anchors at home with their books and dogs and children. I think we have a chance for positive change.

The virus knows that race, gender, class and national boundaries are all fictions. This could help us realise we are all passengers on Spaceship Earth. I’m hoping that this crisis not only exposes inequalities, but helps us learn what movements have been trying to teach us: we are linked, not ranked.

The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! Thoughts on Life, Love and Rebellion by Gloria Steinem (Murdoch Books, £9.99) is out now.

THE GUARDIAN

This much I know / Gloria Steinem / ‘Do what you love so much you forget what time it is’

‘I was never considered beautiful until I was a [well-known] feminist.
Then I became aware of the reductionist commentary on “what a feminist looks like”’: Gloria Steinem. 
Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

 

THIS MUCH I KNOW

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Gloria Steinem: ‘Do what you love so much you forget what time it is’

The 81-year-old feminist, writer and activist on having a depressed mother, her fear of public speaking, and Beyoncé

Leah Jewett
Saturday 19 March 2016

The idea of being a feminist wasn’t present in the culture I grew up in. I thought I might be able to escape a female fate as an individual, but I didn’t understand it was possible to change the fate itself. That only became clear to me, thanks to other women, in the late 1960s.

My mother loved words. She knew a lot of poetry by heart. She had been a writer before I was born, though I didn’t know that till I was in my teens. Because she had given up her life [to raise a family] she was very depressed often, and unable to function. In many ways I feel I’m living out her unlived life.

I used to be a “pretty girl”, if I made an effort. But I was never considered beautiful until I was a [well-known] feminist. Then I became aware of the reductionist commentary on “what a feminist looks like”, and this attitude that if you were pretty enough to get a man, why would you want equal pay?

Many things touch me, make me well up with tears. I have to stop talking, or somehow feel it for awhile, before I start again.

With every year of higher education, a woman increasingly studies her own absence from history

When women don’t see themselves represented in culture, their confidence diminishes. Research on young male and female achievers showed that a woman’s intellectual self-esteem diminishes with every year of higher education she undertakes, because she increasingly studies women’s absence from history. If you looked at research isolating race, it would probably be the same.

Anything I can dance to makes me happy. It has to have a danceable rhythm, and I am old-fashioned enough to like understandable lyrics.I hate conflict. It makes my stomach drop still. And I never got over my fear of public speaking.

At least female comics exist now. There were very few until the 60s. They usually had to depend on stereotypes in order to be acceptable in their humour. The power to make people laugh is a power in and of itself. It’s absolutely crucial.

I find it extraordinary that Beyoncé, in her video Formation, managed to accumulate so many profoundly different kinds of images. She didn’t only use sensuous images, or those of poverty, or high fashion.Putting them all into one song was unifying, healing. And so was admitting, not trying to conceal, the painful.

The women’s movement globally is still perceived as separate from other world events. Yet the single biggest indicator of whether a country is violent in itself, or would be violent militarily, is not poverty, access to natural resources, religion or even degree of democracy, it’s violence against females. That’s what normalises other violence.

As a child I escaped into books. My idea of reading was that I started a book and kept going all night until I finished it. Also, there was a lake across the road from our house, and I loved the life of that water, catching turtles, seeing a storm as it approached.

I’m a night person. Definitely.

Here’s what I’d advise a teenage girl: do not listen to me – listen to yourself, the unique voice inside you. Do what you love so much you forget what time it is while you’re doing it. Trust your instincts. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck but you think it’s a pig, it’s a pig. To a teenage boy I’d give the same advice.

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This much I Know / Jonathan Pryce / ‘Love is the most important thing’

‘In lockdown, we all looked out for each other’: Jonathan Pryce. Photograph: Karen Robinson/

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Jonathan Pryce: ‘Love is the most important thing’

Michael Hogan
Saturday 8 August 2020

The actor, 73, on surviving coronavirus, being Pope for a few weeks, and a smouldering Warren Beatty

Michael Hogan

My father had a nervous breakdown. My parents opened a small grocery shop and he always let customers put things on tick. He was a town councillor, on the housing committee, very caring. People ended up owing him a lot of money. When I was 11, he walked out of the house and went missing for days. When he was found, he’d lost his memory. It’s why I’ve never got into debt.

The Welsh countryside was one big adventure playground. When we weren’t at school, we ran wild. There was a local paedophile but everyone knew to avoid him.

My art teacher, Ifor Jones, was an early role model. He had wonderful italic handwriting – as did I soon after, because I copied it. Aged 17, I got in trouble for driving without insurance and the clerk of the court congratulated me on my handwriting. Ifor’s son came to see me in The Merchant of Venice at the Globe in 2015 and gave me a letter from his father. I welled up when I saw the handwriting on the envelope.

Theatre can still change the world. A live experience goes deeper and stays with people longer. Film is more fleeting. It can have social impact, but there’s only one Ken Loach, sadly.

Warren Beatty looked every inch a film star. I met him a few times and I went to supper in New York in 1976. I watched women take the scenic route to the toilet so they walked past him. Every time, he’d take off his glasses and smoulder.

Work is my therapy. My father was violently attacked and died when I was 28. Five years later, I played Hamlet at the Royal Court. It helped me work out a lot of things about our relationship.

Bill Nighy always fetches a high price. I used to organise charity cabarets and auctioning off Bill invariably raised the most money. He’s stopped agreeing to it now. I think he got tired of being propositioned by ladies of a certain age.

Love is the most important thing. Giving and receiving love. I’ve been with my wife Kate [Fahy] for 48 years and it’s flown by. Where did the time go?

I got starstruck meeting Morecambe and Wise. I was a huge fan, then Eric Morecambe came up to me at this event and said: “Hello, Jon. How are you?” He chatted away like we were old pals. I was dumbfounded. It turned out a mutual friend had put him up to it.

Whenever I get depressed by our appalling leadership, I gain comfort from the fact that we’re not as bad as America.

The High Sparrow in Game Of Thrones got compared to Jeremy Corbyn, but I actually based him on Pope Francis. Three years later, I ended up playing him, too. I’m a lifelong Labour supporter and a lot of his instincts were right, but he shouldn’t have been leader. I protested side by side with Corbyn twice during the 70s. He hasn’t moved on since.

I didn’t want to do The Two Popes. I thought playing Pope Francis was a hiding to nothing. A living Pope? I wasn’t going to please anybody. But it ended up being a joyous experience. One of my best jobs ever. We screened it in Rome for members of the Vatican and they seemed to think I’d got him right.

One comfort of being in lockdown was that everyone else was, too. Well, apart from Dominic Cummings. I live in an area of east London with a lovely community feel. We all looked out for each other, dropping off home-made bread and cakes. I’ve secretly enjoyed being cocooned at home.

I had coronavirus in late March. I was hospitalised for eight days with Covid pneumonia. It left me tired and anxious for a long time, but I’m over that. I’ve now got high levels of antibodies so I’m secretly rather pleased with myself.

I always thought I’d find religion in my old age and it would be the answer to everything. It ain’t happened, apart from being Pope for a few weeks.

Jonathan Pryce is supporting Crisis’s Home for All campaign

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