Goldberg Quotes
In the highly improbable event of his being asked to nominate the one most un-Jewish thing he could think of, Sefton Goldberg would have been hard pressed to decide between Nature – that's to say birds, trees, flowers, and country walks – and football – that's to say beer, bikies, mud, and physical pain.
Howard Jacobson
But I want very much to be accepted as a good actor, and I have to admit this. Just before the first screenings of The Color Purple, I had some doubts about my name. Steven had told me the billing would read, "And Introducing Whoopi Goldberg as Celie." I had nightmares that when it appeared, a little ripple of laughter would run through the audience and it would grow and grow until it became a horrendous roar of guffaws. Well, I forced myself to go to a screening, and when my name appeared, all I could think was, "Oh, my, how elegant that looks!"
Whoopi Goldberg
The name was a fluke. A joke. It started when I was doing A Christmas Carol in San Diego. We'd sit backstage and talk about names we'd never give our children, like Pork Pie or Independence. Of course, now people are walking around with those names. A woman said to me, "If I was your mother, I would have called you Whoopi, because when you're unhappy you make a sound like a whoopee cushion. It sounds like a fart." It was like "Ha-ha-ha-ha-Whoopi!" So people actually started calling me Whoopi Cushion. After about a year, my mother said, "You won't be taken seriously if you call yourself Whoopi Cushion. So try this combination: Whoopi Goldberg.
Whoopi Goldberg
The Goldberg Variations are, as explained in my booklet-text, in short, music that observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music that, like Baudelaire's lovers, "rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” Gould is referring here to the circular design of the work, a circularity whose development is polarized, inspired, and fed by more and more new energy fields. The result is a universe that in its significance resembles the alpha and omega of music in general, music that evolves out of nothing and disappears back into nothing as if in a state in which time stands still.
Burkard Schliessmann