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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I decided when my two little kids were one and two years old, to give up being a professor at Harvard. Harvard had been an identity. When you are connected to a university -- and especially one like Harvard -- you go places and you say, "I'm a Harvard professor." They know who you are. I had written my Lyndon Johnson book, but I didn't have the same confidence that I could be as good a writer as I thought I was as a teacher. So it was scary to give up that umbrella in a certain sense. But I knew that if I could spend the time writing and being at home with my kids, that if I could do that, it would give me more satisfaction, because I wouldn't feel torn in a million directions, as I was feeling. Luckily, it really did work out, because I don't think I would have had the chance to write the book on the Kennedys, to write the book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if I was also trying to teach. I think I would have been doing things sort of half well all the way through. It wasn't so easy at that time.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
Doris Kearns Goodwin: When the first book came out on Lyndon Johnson, before the reviews came out, I was certainly not sure how it would be received. It was the first. I had never even written articles before, much less a book, and I was young in writing it, and a lot was riding on it, because I needed to stay teaching for my tenure at Harvard. I needed it for my reputation as an historian. So I remember, in those months before the book came out, being quite scared. I mean, there's no question. The weird thing is -- I mean, luckily the reviews were wonderful. So I had this quick sense of being able to feel somewhat confident about it. But then you think, once the first one was really successful, then you would be fine when the second one came out. But I got nervous all over again, and I think you almost have to. I think it's like anybody who performs. If you're not nervous each time a new book comes out -- or even when I'm writing a book, if I finish one chapter and I go to write the next chapter, I wonder, "Can I write this next chapter? What do I have to say? I don't remember what I'm going to do."
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
Confrontation with life, that is what causes a person to adopt a critical position. But for that to happen, you yourself have got to have a certain amount of resources and vision, confidence in democracy, devotion to freedom. If you simply bend in the wind and cave in under the pressure of circumstance, you will accept things as they are. And in that case you do not develop a position of protest and criticism, but you will simply become like many others before you. Even now in Russia we have the same problem. It isn't so easy to give up the inheritance we received from Stalinism and Neo-Stalinism, when people were turned into cogs in the wheel, and those in power made all the decisions for them.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
Nothing much to say that's beyond the personal that I don't choose to discuss. I was real sick for about a year and a half, and through some combination of good medicine and a little bit of determination, I got better, thank goodness. There's this great desire, since it was pretty miserable and I had to spend a lot of time struggling to get well, to think there was something worthwhile that came out of it. That's what people ask me all the time. "Well, what did you learn having to change the direction of your life?" I wish I could say that it did, since I had to spend the time and there was a certain amount of pain and suffering involved in it. I would like to say, "Well it changed everything. I got a great insight to my whole life." But it wasn't, basically it was a most unwelcome interruption that had to be dealt with. I don't know what else to say about it.
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