If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle. These tend to be matters of design. I mean, we're seeing a lot of - it's very common to see Shakespeare with automatic weapons, things like that. They are clichés. They're new clichés, but they are clichés. And they're provincial. It's not clever to do Henry V, and have everybody dressed in United Nations soldier's costumes anymore. I've seen that one too. That kind of thing irritates me.

The papers that flourish will be papers that serve a national audience. Papers that have figured out how to make the transition to the electronic platform that aren't simply providing a duplicate experience of the words on paper experience, but are doing something that arises organically from the new electronic medium. It's really just a matter of finding the right platforms for the way people want to read newspapers. I mean, maybe it will be the iPhone. But one way or another, newspapers on paper are just not really going to exist to any significant degree within a decade.

The problem with the Jude Law "Hamlet" was simply that it wasn't unpredictable, that it was a very down-the-center modern production. You wouldn't go to the theater expecting to see an old-fashioned "Hamlet" where everybody wears an old fashioned costume. You don't get points for putting on a "Hamlet" where everybody dresses in black. I've seen that one several times. But again, it's not that it has to be new, it simply that it has to be different, fresh, that it doesn't bore, that it doesn't make me - I don't feel as I'm watching it that I know where it's going to go.

I know that luck has a way of happening to people who shoot high, who never sell themselves short.

(R)eality TV (is) a medium dedicated to the proposition that with the help of judicious editing, carefully chosen half-wits can hold the attention of millions of their fellow half-wits for weeks on end.

Your regional newspaper, and I like to use this example, in your local museum buys a Picasso, that's news especially if they've spent $10 million for it. But if you don't have a credit on your staff then you don't have anybody who's confident to say whether or not it was a good Picasso, might even be aware of the fact that there are bad Picassos. Arts journalists who don't have the experience of criticism, the skill of criticism, don't think in terms of critical evaluation are not going to be as good a journalist as they might be.

I had a checklist in my mind of the things that make a biography practical. Is the source material centralized? Is it easy to find? Are there new primary sources that no one has ever had access to? Are all the sources in English? If they're not, are they in a language that you speak? And I realized that not only is Armstrong the most important figure of Jazz in the 20th Century, but he's a perfect subject for a biography for all of these reasons. I had always loved his music and I had been fascinated in him as a personality. And that's really the key to writing a biography.