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Milton Friedman
Nobel Prize in Economics
We went out to Wisconsin on a visiting arrangement for a year, the University of Wisconsin's Department of Economics. I got embroiled in the center of an internal dispute. It really was quite a storm. There was a conflict. There was a business school that was trying to take over the economics department, and there was a dean of the arts and sciences who was trying to improve what he thought was a mediocre economics department. He offered me a tenured position at Wisconsin and I accepted it. But then, all hell broke loose. The people of the business school and some of the people in the economics department started to complain about how this arrogant dean was trying to force me down their throats, and I was just this young brash man from New York, and he was offering me a higher salary. I think it was all of -- what was it -- $2,600 a year? I think that was it. Maybe it was $3,000. It was that order of magnitude. He was offering me that, and that was higher than they were paying somebody else. So anyway, as I say, the real thing that was happening was a dispute between the economics department and the school of business. But I became the center of it, and it also involved elements of anti-semitism. In Wisconsin, this was in 1940, when the war had started in Europe, but not here. Wisconsin, as you know, had a large German population and there were a number of people in the economics department who were very strong sympathizers with Germany. And as is not surprising, I was not, and I spoke it very openly, my belief that the United States ought to go to war on the side of the Allies. So at any rate, that got involved. When it got to that point, I quit. I asked the dean to withdraw my name from consideration and quit. Nonetheless, that was a very traumatic experience. I have since been involved in similar public disputes, but that was the earliest and the defining one, if I may say so, for me.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
Pablo Neruda once said to me, "You know, we Latin American writers, we all travel with the bodies of our countries on our back. We carry our countries on our back. We are responsible to our countries, because our countries don't have political freedom, because illiteracy is in the 80s. For all the reasons you know, it is up to us to give voice to the voiceless." Today that is no longer true. Most Latin American countries are democracies, with regular elections, political parties, liberty for the unions, agrarian co-ops. In general, there is democratic freedom in Latin America. So if you want to be a writer that participates in politics, you do so with the honesty of saying, "I am in politics. I am a writer. Being a writer doesn't give me special privileges. Let me be judged by my political thoughts and actions."
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
One can write comfortable novels, become a best seller, make yourself simpatico to a lot of readers. That's not my way. I want to take a risk with every book I write, and pose challenges to myself and to the reader. Sometimes I'm not an easy read, but I want the reader to come along with me and realize that he's climbing a mountain with me, that sometimes it may be difficult and sometimes even useless -- I don't care. But I'm not going to make the path just easy by writing something that I know will be popular or easy to read. That's not in my nature. I would rather rewrite my books the way I have already written them than debase myself in some way and say, "Now this is easy. Munch it up. It's easy to digest." No, no, no. Life is hard, difficult. Thought is difficult. Situations are extreme, and you must make an effort with the writer to travel this road. It is not easy for you. It wasn't easy for me either. But maybe there is a reward at the end. Maybe there isn't a reward. Maybe you have failed. But if there is a reward at the end of a hard trail, then you've done a good job.
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Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
It's a common theme I have that runs through so much of my work is that theme of commitment, of responsibility, that we are responsible for ourselves, regardless of whether we have four or five months to live, as Jefferson has before he's to be executed, or someone like Grant who would have maybe 50 years more to live. What do you do with that time? What are you going to do for yourself, your family, your community? What do you do with your life during that time? So I was dealing with those kind of things.
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