Sarah Vowell

In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.

When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry - except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.

I thank Marc Jacobs so much for giving me the opportunity to design a shoe for Louis Vuitton, but the thing that broke my heart most was when they said, 'You're finished. The shoe's finished.'