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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: I didn't set out to become a reviewer much, but I did. I was a New Yorker writer and looking for any way in which I could appear in the magazine and sell, and I began to drift into reviewing by 1960, not very many at first. They had other reviewers, but as they died off, I became for a while almost the main reviewer. I did more reviews than anybody else, and you could say I was doing too many. I did try to avoid American contemporaries, many of whom, as you say, I knew, because who knows where envy or friendship enter in and distort the honesty of the book report. So, I tried to review foreign, dead or European or Latin American writers. There was a lot of ferment and magic realism. The novel in Europe was much more overtly experimental than I'm aware of it being now. So I thought there were things I could learn, just as a reader, from reading these books, so I tried to read books that would further my own education, as well as earn me the money of the book review and keep me up.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
It's very easy -- when you've written for those three or four hours -- your appetite for words is rather diminished, so it's all too easy to not read much, so the reviews did keep me reading and acquainted with trends. Trends in what do we do with this old dinosaur -- the novel. Because the novel is a very capacious plastic. It's sort of what you make it, and it's taken many forms. Ulysses is -- you can't repeat that, but that is an example of a novel that really tried to do everything. So we post-moderns are faced with this notion that maybe we're not taking it far enough. We're accepting the old conventions, quote marks and "he said, she said," when we had these experimental writers who have done so much. So anyway, it's good in a way to make yourself think about these basic issues. Why are you doing this at all? What are you bringing to it that's different? Are you just feeding the machine or are you in some way altering the machine? All these things are probably up to a point useful, but in the end you're left with your own intuitions and your own sense of -- whatever -- beauty or meaning or urgency.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
When I went to college I initially thought I was going to major in pre-med kind of courses, but I took math courses and I found them much more intellectually stimulating than the standard pre-med courses. So, I decided to major in mathematics and, in fact, went to graduate school in mathematics for a year. I finished college early, so I had an extra year to kind of fool around, and I went to graduate school. I took graduate courses in math. And, I began to feel, even though math was incredibly intellectually stimulating, it didn't have the practical edge that I wanted. I wanted to be able to do something for people.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
Our laboratory was right above the radiation therapy unit. Radiation therapy, of course, is where cancer patients get x-rays treatments for their disease. And in order to get to our laboratory, I actually had to walk through the radiation treatment area. And, every day we'd come in and we'd see dozens of patients lined up waiting to get these treatments, and they were all very sick, many of them were in wheelchairs. You could see that they were just in terrible shape; most of them you knew were going to die relatively soon. And, you couldn't possibly walk through that room and not run up the stairs and start working. It just continually reinforced the idea that this is a disease, people are getting it, they shouldn't get it, we've got to do something about it.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
When I was a child, the principles of life in the countryside were very, very clear, especially our attitude towards nature, but also in the human relations. It is true that with nature, you would steal some things from nature, you would hunt something in nature, but with great respect, and whenever nature needed some assistance from us, when there was winter, when things were difficult for nature, we wouldn't hunt, and then we would help nature and all the living creatures. Nobody even dared to go hunting in this period. And, as far into human relationships, the principles were also very transparent and clear. If people had things that they -- some reproach or some resentment -- it was only natural to say it straightforwardly and explain what the resentment is about. Sometimes manually I would say it, but without the courtesy, without the "please," and I must say that they were usually very honest dealings because as I said, they were very straightforward principles, straightforward rules, but very honest, and that's why I liked them.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
The education, the background that I had, the straightforward principles that I referred to, based on rules and values -- which is the truth, honesty, decent behavior, decency -- all this really gave me a lot of support around people, among the working people. It was a little bit more difficult to find some understanding among the powerful people, the hierarchy because I would often criticize them. I would point out things that they did wrong or that didn't function well. So, the point was that I got some support and some stimulus from the low levels, whereas I wouldn't get the criticism from the top levels of the people.
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