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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
I realize now that the most important thing that is an American Dream -- in looking at people living in other countries, in looking at the life my sisters had not growing up in this country -- is the American freedom to create your own identity. I think that's uniquely American. In no other country do you have that opportunity. It's not to say that everything will happen fairly and the way that you want. But I think that this is a country where that opportunity -- to be as wild as you want, as generous as you want, as crazy as you want, as artistic as you want, that all of that, the whole range -- exists. And we have a Constitution, a tradition, a culture that supports that. I hope it continues to support that. I hope it especially continues to support the arts in that direction. It is that self-determination of your identity, to define what it means to be an American, and that nobody defines that for you.
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Wayne Thiebaud
Painter and Teacher
Wayne Thiebaud: Well, I'm essentially a kind of self-educated person, I guess. But I think everybody is; that's the way we really learn. In other words, you see examples and so on. But I didn't ever go really to a formal art school, for instance, particularly a fine arts school. But I would love to have gone, I wanted to go. So in that case, it's possible, I think, not only in America but every place, to take it on yourself. But that is a part, I think, of the American character, in terms of the frontier theory idea, where you make your own hot rod or you build your own log cabin. You know, all these instances of hands-on, willing to work, "I can make it better. I can do it differently." So that is a part, at least for me, of what I do. I think the work for me is very American, although I love all art, from whatever country or tradition. I just think that where you live, how you live, and what you take on, mostly is this little area of America for me.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
"Well, why not tell what happened and bring Rabbit back." This was during the late '60s, when there was a lot of turmoil in America, and so I brought him back this time as kind of an everyman who is witnessing the pageant of protest and disturbance, distress, drug use, everything, almost everything was in that book, including the moon shot. In fact, the moon shot is kind of a central event in it, so that the Rabbit who came back the second time was a much more purposefully representative American than my initial Rabbit. He was just, you know, a high school athlete who had no where much to go after he graduated, whereas the second Rabbit was kind of a growing man trying to learn in a way. I've always seen Rabbit, and indeed Americans in general, as learners, as willing to learn. They may be slow to learn, but there is an openness to our mind set that I think enables us to overcome our mistakes or our prejudices and move forward. Certainly the world now is so much more open. I mean, it is easy to be sentimental about the '30s and '40s and the war time solidarity and all that, but there was so much racism, sexism, everything. It was a brutal world compared to the one we're trying to make now.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: I certainly bought into the American Dream that was voiced by the propagandists of World War II, and I was a great moviegoer, and the movies in the '30s and '40s were where you could see preachments about the American dream. So, I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity -- in the broadest sense -- with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action. For all of the knocks that we take in the foreign press, and we have taken a lot lately, I think this is still a country where people want to come, and they want to come, I think, because they feel they are -- a French friend of one of my stepsons, a boy about 16, just said about the way people dress in America, he said, "They are not afraid." I thought this was a great insight, you know. In France, a lot of people -- the French are in a way afraid not to dress in the appropriate costume of a happy housewife or whatever, and there is a kind of sense of the proper way to dress. And, in America you have the sense -- so that was his way of saying that it's a country without a government we need be afraid of. The country, the land has been good to me. I realize I was lucky, and born at a lucky time, too. So, I hesitate to prescribe for today's children, but I would hope they would grow up with something of the same sense that it's a privilege to be an American.
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