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Joyce Carol Oates

National Book Award

Joyce Carol Oates: I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression. So, I've been so interested in my parents' generation. And probably out of that respect -- a curiosity for what they lived through -- grew my fascination with subject matter.
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Joyce Carol Oates

National Book Award

I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process. That is, to describe a scene that moves me emotionally, to render it into language so that it may evoke the same emotion in a reader. I find that I'm in love with the external world, and writing is a way of conveying that.
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Joyce Carol Oates

National Book Award

I came into the classroom, and there were about 40 students. It was a night class. And I had been very excited and really frightened because I had never taught before. And I remember walking in the room, and I came to the podium and I looked out and some of these students were older than I was - I was only about 22. Such a feeling of happiness came over me. I thought, "This is where I belong." Then I started teaching, and I just loved it.
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Pierre Omidyar

Founder and Chairman, eBay

Pierre Omidyar: I was actually interested in gadgets, little electronic gadgets. Whether it was calculators -- actually I remember early on going out shopping for a calculator -- and this was when calculators were like $100, you know, I mean -- and with my dad, I think. And so I was always fascinated by these little gadgets and I always managed to break them for one reason or another, of course, as kids do, and then I would take them apart and try to fix them, which I was never able to.
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Pierre Omidyar

Founder and Chairman, eBay

Pierre Omidyar: I've always been into the gadgets and I guess when I first saw a computer -- I'm trying to think if it was third -- it might have been third grade. It was pretty early on actually and it was an early TRS-80, you know, Radio Shack. Kind of the original Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, 4K of memory. I think this one had the 4K or the 8K expansion module, which was like as big as a desk, you know, and learned how to program Basic on it. And I used to actually cut gym and sneak into the computer room -- which wasn't really a room, it was a closet where they kept the computer between classes -- and played on the computer.
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Pierre Omidyar

Founder and Chairman, eBay

I was just pursuing what I enjoyed doing. I mean, I was pursuing my passion. And the whole -- you know, the ability to create software that could have a benefit or an impact on people that used it was what was driving me. And so I was driven by, you know, mass market software and the whole notion of just being able to do neat things. And like most software people, it is very much a passion more than anything else. And so, like people have said, it is not really work, you know, if you are having fun, it's not work so that was the case with me.
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Larry Page

Founding CEO, Google Inc.

Larry Page: I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work. My brother taught me how to take things apart, and I took apart everything in the house. So I just became interested in it, for whatever reason, and so I had lots of ideas about what things could be built and how to build them and all these kinds of things. I built like an electric go-cart at a pretty early age.
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Larry Page

Founding CEO, Google Inc.

Larry Page: I read all the computer magazines and things like that, and I was sort of interested in how these things really work -- anything having to do with the mechanics behind things, either the mechanics or the electronics. I wanted to be able to build things. Actually, in college I built an inkjet printer out of Legos, because I wanted to be able to print really big images. I figured you could print really big posters really cheaply using inkjet cartridges. So I reverse-engineered the cartridge, and I built all the electronics and mechanics to drive it. Just sort of fun projects. I like to be able to do those kinds of things.
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