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Carol Shields
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
People in those days had -- in the '40s, '50s -- had two weeks vacation a year. That was it. And it seemed to me that work was something to dread. It was an oppressive obligation that weighted all of us when we got through the charmed childhood. People spoke about work as something that was a burden that they had to bear. But I had a teacher in Grade 4 -- and, by the way, all of the schools in my town were named after writers, so this was Ralph Waldo Emerson Public School -- I could tell she loved her job. She loved it. She got there early, started each day with sort of a joyous burst, was devoted to us. I could tell she loved her job, and that was a very important thing for me to understand and to understand it early, that work could be a good thing.
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Carol Shields
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
I loved being a poet. It was a very happy writing time in my life, and I think partly because a poem is such a small thing. I always think of it as a kind of toy. You can get it almost right, and you can never get a novel almost right because a novel is just too big. There are just too many little parts to it, too many twigs and leaflets. But a poem you can get just about right. And it was a very happy writing time in my life, so that I never think of it now as apprenticeship for novel writing. It was a whole different way of wanting to express myself. I would like to think I could go back to it one day, but I seem to have forgotten my way into a poem. I can't do it any more.
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Carol Shields
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Carol Shields: I always have trouble with this because I always try to get students to rewrite their work, and they never want to. It's in the rewriting where I find the exhilarating part of the whole enterprise. The writing itself, the first draft, the sort of hacking at the stone wall, seems to me to be such a difficult piece of work that it's hard to see where pleasure comes into this process. But once something is on the page and you start moving it around, changing words, moving sentences -- I love sentences, by the way. This is why I'm a writer. I love to make sentences. I even love punctuation. I once sent a whole class to sleep by talking about the semicolon for three-quarters of an hour. I love all of this stuff that we are given, this little handful of equipment and raw materials. So it is a joyous expression when you see something come together at last, and then the next day you look at it and you realize you haven't done it at all, and then you do it again, and that's even better when you -- so you get closer and closer to what you really want to say, to what you really mean. You never get right at it, and I think you have to accept that as a writer, that, you know, what we call "the golden book in our head" is not going to make it to the page completely. But we can keep getting closer and closer, and I find this exhilarating. And I'm not a very patient person, but with this one aspect of my life, I have enormous patience.
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Donna Shirley
Mars Exploration Program
When I was 12 or so I started reading science fiction. And, I read Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars, and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein's books about Mars, and just got completely fascinated with the idea of Mars and going into space and space travel. And so, when I got to college, there really wasn't a space program. I got to college in 1958 and that was the year that Explorer One was orbited, following Sputnik. And so, you really couldn't specialize in space, nobody knew how to do it. And so, I ended up still working on airplanes.
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Donna Shirley
Mars Exploration Program
I was disappointed in a way because I had 25 years of experience communicating with the media and all that sort of stuff, so I was the one that was out in front of the TV cameras. My boss and I, Norm Haynes, were doing that, so that the reporters wouldn't be in bothering the people flying the mission. So, I'm out in front of CNN cameras and all I can see is this little monitor and it's a really hot, bright July 4th day, and so I can't see very well. And the anchor's saying, "What's going on? What's going on? I can't see what's going on! Get me a sunshade! And so I'd see them jumping up and down and I'd say, "Well, they must have made it." And, then we'd hear something on the earphones. So, I was experiencing this kind of vicariously, but I mean, it was just an incredibly emotional moment.
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Donna Shirley
Mars Exploration Program
The lander camera could take pictures of the ramp the rover was coming down. And, there was a young scientist named Justin Mackie, who had figured out how to program the camera to turn, so that it would catch the rover as it was doing things. So, it would make a little -- like a jerky movie. And so, the camera -- the first picture comes back and there's just the ramp sitting there. And I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, the rover didn't get up," or whatever. And then, the next picture and then all of a sudden you see the ramp bend and then the rover comes into view. And then -- so there's six images for it to get down on the ground. And, this guy from Mission Control, Art Thompson says, "Six wheels on soil." And it was just the greatest experience, it was a terrific, really terrific high.
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Alan Simpson
Statesman and Advocate
I loved legislating. So you have to pick what you like. I couldn't be a governor, couldn't be a president. Wouldn't be worth a whit. I'm not an administrator. I loved the hearings. I didn't love them, but I mean you learn from the hearings. And I did the floor management of big bills and I worked with guys on the other side of the aisle who didn't have my philosophy at all. Been there two years and my three ranking members are Ted Kennedy, Al Cranston and Gary Hart. I went to them, I said, "Look, you're all three running for president. I'm not going to hinder your quest, but don't you use this subcommittee for your quest." We made that, and the unfortunate thing in Washington now is people think the word "compromise" means wimp, that you were a wimp. And that's sick. Because if you don't learn how to compromise an issue without compromising yourself, you can't legislate. It won't happen.
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