Zitat des Tages über Todesanzeigen / Obituaries:
Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.
The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes.
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.
My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
It's like obituaries, when you die they finally give you good reviews.
I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
