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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: I recall that on one or two occasions, I spoke to some of them and said, "You know, are you aware that if you continue to behave in this way, they will turn their dogs on you, they will whip you, they may detain you without trial, they will torture you in their jails, and they may even kill you?," and it was almost like privata on the part of these kids because almost all of them said, "So what. It doesn't matter if that happens to me, as long as it contributes to our struggle for freedom," and I think 1994, when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first democratically elected president, vindicated them. It was the vindication of those 1977 remarkable kids.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: We received death threats, yes, but you see when you are in a struggle, there are going to have to be casualties, and why should you be exempt? But I often said, "Look, here, God, if I'm doing your work, then you jolly well are going to have to look after me!" And God did God's stuff. But it was -- I mean people prayed. People prayed. You know, there's a wonderful image in the Book of the prophet Zechariah, where he speaks about Jerusalem not having conventional walls, and God says to this overpopulated Jerusalem, "I will be like a wall of fire 'round you." Frequently in the struggle, we experienced a like wall of fire -- people all over the world surrounding us with love. And you know that image of the Prophet Elijah -- he is surrounded by enemies, and his servant is scared, and Elijah says to God, "Open his eyes so that he should see," and God opens the eyes of the servant, and the servant looks, and he sees hosts and hosts and hosts of angels. And the prophet says to him, "You see? Those who are for us are many times more than those against us."
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: That semester I think I placed four or five more stories with them, as well as quite a number of light verse poems. Light verse was in its twilight, but I didn't know that so I kept scribbling the stuff and they kept running it for a while. So, I was kind of establishing myself as a dependable contributor and they were a paternalistic organization that tried to gather unto itself talented -- whatever -- writers. And it was funny to want to do that, because really about the only slot they had to offer was to write for "Talk of the Town," the front section. We moved in, a little family of three into Riverside Drive, and I began to write these stories, and discovered I could do it, and had kind of a good time doing it. You went around in New York and interviewed people who attended Coliseum shows -- kitchen appliances or whatever -- and I was very good at making something out of almost nothing. But, I thought after two years that maybe I had gone as far as I could with "The Talk of the Town" as an art form and I felt New York was a kind of unnatural place to live. I had two children at this point, and my wife didn't have too many friends and wasn't, I didn't think, very happy. Well in the '50s one didn't think too hard about whether or not your wife was happy, sad to say, but even I could see that, so I said, "Why don't we quit the job for a while." I thought they'd take me back if it didn't work out, and I'll try to freelance up in New England, so there is where we went. We moved to a small town in New England and I never had to go back because I was able to support myself.
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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
Gore Vidal: It was a book about the absolute normality of "same-sexuality," as it was sometimes called. Remember, I spent all my life not only in boys' schools, but here I am stuck in three years of the Army. I knew exactly what went on in the real world. It was Walt Whitman who said, "No one will ever know what goes on in armies." Everybody thought it was the bloodshed and so on. Whitman was after different game. I knew what went on in the real world, and I thought, well, nobody would write about it.
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