"...Charles Mingus wrote about afternoons spent in his youth, watching Sam Rodia as he went about his patient, complex work of building, transforming, tearing down then rebuilding the bizarre spirals known today as the Watts Towers. ...Years later...it struck him () that Rodia’s Towers was much like the impulsive but meticulously structured music he had just been playing--that is, was a resourceful and vital work, an invention for freedom and transcendence." --Mikal Gilmore, in: The Watts Towers of Los Angeles, Leon Whiteson, 1989

'Mussolini spoke like a peasant from Romagna; he uttered the words: problem, Mediterranean Sea, Suez, Ethiopia--as if he were uttering the words: card game, Lambrusco wine, riot, Forli. Lord Perth had the accent of an Oxford undergraduate who is distantly related to someone in Scotland--the accent of Magdalen College of the Mitre Hotel, of the Mesopotamia Island and of Perthshire. He uttered the words: problem, Mediterranean Sea, Suez, Ethiopia--as if he were uttering the words: cricket, Serpentine, whisky, Edinburgh.' --Kaputt