The Best Live Events at NYPL in 2014

2014 was a great year for live events at the New York Public Library. From filmmakers to authors, choreographers to visual artists, our remarkable guests shared insights into their inspirations, their philosophies on art, and even how to keep houseguest visits short. Even if you weren't able to attend, you can still experience the highlights right along with us as we remember our favorite NYPL events of 2014.

Live 2014

Alexei Ratmansky on just dancing

"As beautiful as it is and as serious as it is, I think it's still just dancing. Ballet is just dancing. We can't compete with literature, with philosophy... Dance originally comes from very simple emotions, like you're having a party, you drink, you have a good time, you have your friend around, and you start dancing."

Ben Lerner on sincerity

“For me as a poet growing up with a modernist poetics, there was always this idea that contemporary reception was always just horribly compromised by the market and one definition for Colum McCabe was that modernism displaces its readers into the future. You’re supposed to produce these difficult works that survive recuperation by the market but then one day in this imagined future there’s gonna be somebody like smart enough and pure enough to read your book. And so a lot of modernist literature is very contemptuous, not all of it, but a lot of it is very contemptuous of the reader in the present, and I wanted to move away from it, to kind of purge myself of those tendencies.”

Wes Anderson on The 400 Blows

"This movie in particular I think was one of the reasons I started thinking I would like to try to make movies. This is such a personal story. And it's the director's story, you know, it's this man's; it's like a first novel."

Kara Walker on creating A Subtlety orthe Marvelous Sugar Baby in the Domino Sugar Factory

"I really sort of have to take on the hutzpah of the industrialist. You know, I actually have to kind of ingest that if I'm going to be in this space and not simply look at it as a ruin but look on it as a site that was all about possibility. You know, as building the American Dream... To only sort of look at the underbelly and the blood, it sort of just elicits vengeful, angry feelings, but not necessarily art I would want to look at or make. So I think to have the other side of it meant that I could bring these two kind of opposing universes together. And I think they're percolating in me in various forms anyway."

Joyce Carol Oates on writing from dreams

"Our dreams are filled with these strange images and these strange things, but mostly we let them fade away. If you seized one of them that was really mysterious and disturbing and just thought about it, obviously you could construct a story around that."

John Waters on furnishing a guest room

"I have, in the guest rooms, ridiculous books. By your bed might be a book called Single and Pregnant... My nieces and nephews have said to me when we have a family get-together and they come from out of town, 'We're not staying at your house!' They refuse to stay in the 'scary room,' [as] they call it. In my guest rooms I have my most alarming items to discourage guests. My mother always said guests and fish always smell after three days."

Katherine Boo on documentary work over time

"Often, you know, you see something in a community that if you only see it in a snapshot, it's irrational. And I think that's part of the importance of documentary work that happens over time."

Learn more about LIVE from NYPL and stay tuned for our spring season announcement!