However their lives began, the creative figures who died this year soon enough made their way to our stages, our galleries, our cinemas, our book shelves. Their ideas and personalities helped shape our culture, and they still have plenty to tell us. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.
“People are like detectives and our lives are filled with clues.”
— David Lynch, director, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)
“I’m still on the search of finding myself.”
— Malcolm-Jamal Warner, actor, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)
“My father’s advice — ‘if you want an interesting life, bloody well go out and get one’ — was good.”
— Frederick Forsyth, writer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)
“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson. If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”
— Roberta Flack, musician, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“In the early days when I was playing guitar, I knew the world didn’t need another B.B. King, Chet Atkins or Les Paul. So, what are you gonna do now? I thought: ‘Just be yourself and do your thing. Don’t go changing.’”
— Steve Cropper, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)
“I don’t consciously think about creating a style that people would follow. I’m trying to respond to time and place with the God-given abilities I have.”
— Frank Gehry, architect, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“Being oneself is better than pretending to be somebody else.”
— Richard Chamberlain, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)
“I don’t know how else to be but raw and honest.”
— Marianne Faithfull, singer and actress, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)
“Just be honest, say something that means something, and amuse yourself.”
— Rosalyn Drexler, artist, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)
“You cannot play a lie. You must play some kind of truth.”
— Gene Hackman, actor, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)
“An audience recognizes truthful performance.”
— Joan Plowright, actress, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life.”
— Tom Stoppard, playwright, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“I’ve never been shy of copying things.”
— Robert Grosvenor, artist, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“I know no one’s really going to copy me, because it’s too much trouble.”
— Jackie Ferrara, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“You are not yourself in front of the camera. You can live many lives, instead of one.”
— Claudia Cardinale, actress, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)
“What drives me is that I constantly want to learn, better myself as an engineer, better myself as a person. I’m constantly looking for the next best thing.”
— Rebecca Heineman, video game designer, born 1963 (Read the obituary.)
“I like being who I am.”
— Sly Stone, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)
“I am just reflecting what I see, and coming at it with my attitude, which is absolutely guilt-free.”
— Madeleine Wickham, writer under the name Sophie Kinsella, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)
“All I’ve ever done is say, ‘Is this something that is an extension of me?’ For ‘Stand By Me,’ I didn’t know if it was going to be successful or not. All I thought was, ‘I like this because I know what it feels like.’”
— Rob Reiner, director, born 1947 (Read the obituary.)
“I remember people would stand up and leave — and often did. But I had work to do, I performed the work no matter what.”
— Alison Knowles, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)
“These are human beings onstage. You’re a human being in the audience. There is humanity on both sides, and it’s your job to complete the work as you see it.”
— Carolyn Brown, dancer, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)
“Art does not ride on a political crest. If you have something to say, you will say it even if you have to be indirect and use the language of an Aesop fable.”
— Yuri Grigorovich, dancer, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)
“I’ve never been very happy about the world. So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.”
— Richard Foreman, playwright, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“There’s always more to discover. That’s what makes me tick.”
— Per Norgard, composer, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)
“I write because I live.”
— Ngugi wa Thiong’o, writer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)
“I believe in the relationship between ritual and theater.”
— Pierre Audi, director, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)
“I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art.”
— Sofia Gubaidulina, composer, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)
“My God is my composer.”
— John Nelson, conductor, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)
“I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself.”
— D’Angelo, musician, born 1974 (Read the obituary.)
“The direction of a melodic line, the stringency and resolution of a harmony — they were riddles to me that I wanted to spend my whole life solving.”
— Charles Strouse, composer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)
“Once I saw ‘Company,’ I thought, ‘That’s not a bad way to spend a life.’”
— William Finn, musical theater writer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)
“When I was 5, and we had gotten a TV, I remember acting out the first movie I had seen, which was ‘Cinderella.’ After that, I would put on shows in our garage and charge people a nickel.”
— Loni Anderson, actress, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)
“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.”
— Fanny Howe, poet, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)
“We were born astonished. We should never grow out of our astonishment.”
— Andrea Gibson, poet, born 1975 (Read the obituary.)
“I’m proud of my accomplishments. When my mom calls me and says, ‘I saw a great picture of you in that magazine,’ I know I earned that.”
— Michelle Trachtenberg, actress, born 1985 (Read the obituary.)
“Nothing’s going to be handed to you. You have to fight like a dirty rotten dog.”
— Diane Ladd, actress, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)
“I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training — they just are.”
— Ozzy Osbourne, musician, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)
“I consider it mandatory to be rude in every painting at certain points.”
— Jo Baer, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“Onstage, I’m a warrior. And the dancer is my best enemy.”
— Eddie Palmieri, musician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“Success is something to shadowbox with, not embrace.”
— Robert Redford, actor and director, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“Prepare for the unexpected, and go with it.”
— Jack DeJohnette, musician, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)
“It is a weird thing that actors have people applaud when they’re done working. I still find that entertaining.”
— Val Kilmer, actor, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)
“It’s never perfect, and it should not be.”
— Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“It is OK to get lost! You don’t have to understand every second. I think that’s the problem. Let the audience get lost. It’s OK.”
— Robert Wilson, playwright and director, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)
“I want the meaning to dawn on the viewer, not bludgeon them.”
— Mel Bochner, artist, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)
“In a society that’s constantly yelling, maybe it’s a strong whisper that can best be heard.”
— Dara Birnbaum, artist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)
“I make myself available to possible audiences. I have found that if you do that and if your work is good, you don’t have to sell yourself. You don’t have to sell your work. You merely have to let people know that you exist.”
— Fred Eversley, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)
“We’ve jumped off a lot of cliffs.”
— Ricardo Scofidio, architect, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)
“When I come through the door, I bring a community with me. I want there to be others after me.”
— Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, artist, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)
“Every breath I take is an accounting. Every word I write is an accounting. And the braver we get about speaking our truths about where we’ve come from, under what conditions we were made, the more folks have to confront the truths about who their people were or are.”
— DéLana R.A. Dameron, writer, born 1985 (Read the obituary.)
“Your deepest sense of duty and obligation is to history and to the people you knew and loved.”
— Edmund White, writer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)
“We have to be mindful of what we let go and what we keep on.”
— Carla Maxwell, dancer and choreographer, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)
“I don’t think about the passage of time — just what I’m doing with it.”
— Loretta Swit, actress, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“I accept a lot of things, but I also fear a lot of things. I fear a lot of things I accept.”
— Graham Greene, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)
“The one thing I don’t want to know ever is where I’m going before I get there. I follow the orders of the book. The book tells me where it wants to go, and I write, and I draw accordingly.
— Jules Feiffer, cartoonist and writer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“I do think it important to stress that writing involves hard work and a routine that should be sacrosanct. And, most importantly, tenacity, since it is an act of faith — the belief that things will come right in the end — well, mostly. If only I always followed my own advice.”
— Zoë Wicomb, writer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)
“The subject chooses the writer.”
— Mario Vargas Llosa, writer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“They say I was an ‘aesthete of misery’ and tried to impose beauty on the poor world. But why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.”
— Sebastião Salgado, photographer, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)
“I went through a lot of hardships, but it taught me that anger will never accomplish anything. You really have to accomplish something with a sense of humor, a sense of self-criticism all the time.”
— Christine Choy, filmmaker, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)
“Having the ability to transmute personal pain, trauma into something expressive is an enormous gift.”
— Claire van Kampen, musician and playwright, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)
“I’d like to be remembered not for the highs I’ve reached but for the depths from which I’ve risen. There were exhilarating highs and abysmal lows. But it was fighting to get out of those lows that I feel most proud of.”
— Connie Francis, singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“I’m so thankful for good health, the misshapen hands that still keep going and the comfort of the alternative fictional worlds I inhabit. I have a rather better time there, I think, than in what’s called ‘the real world,’ which has always seemed a bit of a fiction, to me anyway.”
— Jane Gardam, writer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)
“I create fiction out of reality.”
— Martin Parr, photographer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)
“The best music that I play is right here at home.”
— Garth Hudson, musician, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)
“When I’m not making a movie, I’m home, in pajamas, watching ‘The Rifleman’ on TV, hopefully with my 12-year-old making me a cheeseburger.”
— Michael Madsen, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)
“Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear. Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.”
— Brian Wilson, musician, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)
“You always want to leave them begging for more.”
— George Wendt, actor, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)
“I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.”
— Diane Keaton, actress, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)
Gabe Cohn is a Times editor who writes about arts and culture.
The post Artists We Lost in 2025, in Their Words appeared first on New York Times.
