March 27

"No photographer is as good as the simplest camera."

Edward Steichen
(03/27/1879 – 03/25/1973)
US photographer (died near his birthday)

"It is better to be good than to be original."

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
(03/27/1886 – 08/17/1969)
German architect

"An egotist is a self-made man who worships his creator."

John Bright
(11/16/1811 – 03/27/1889)
English writer

"I've just spent an hour talking to Tallulah for a few minutes."

Fred Keating
(03/27/1897 – 06/29/1961)
US actor

"All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year."

Gloria Swanson
(03/27/1899 – 04/04/1983)
US actor

"Either back us or sack us."

James Callaghan
(03/27/1912 – 03/26/2005)
British PM (47) (see other British PMs) (died near his birthday)

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

Henry Brooks Adams
(02/16/1838 – 03/27/1918)
US writer

"It's complicated, being an American, having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time."

Louis Simpson
(03/27/1923 – )
Jamaican-US writer

"When I'm getting serious about a girl, I show her Rio Bravo and she better f890ing like it."

Quentin Tarantino
(03/27/1963 – )
US actor/director

"A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time."

Mariah Carey
(03/27/1970 – )
Canadian singer

"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is a wonder."

M. C. Escher
(06/17/1898 – 03/27/1972)
Dutch artist

"It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel."

Malcolm Cowley
(08/24/1898 – 03/27/1989)
US writer , on a John Cheever manuscript imitating Hemingway

"There's always one person on every gig who does your secret sign to you. They come up afterwards and get hold of you — always here, on the elbow, where it's really secure—and go, 'I know.'"

Ian Dury
(05/12/1942 – 03/27/2000)
English singer

"An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation."

Billy Wilder
(06/22/1906 – 03/27/2002)
US director

"What is this, an audience or an oil painting?"

Milton Berle
(07/12/1908 – 03/27/2002)
US comic actor, "Mr. Television"

"Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets."

Dudley Moore
(04/19/1935 – 03/27/2002)
English comic, actor (Beyond the Fringe)

"Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness."

Stanislaw Lem
(09/12/1921 – 03/27/2006)
Polish writer (note: a different person from Stanislaw Lec)