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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Robert Strauss: Oh yes, I loved to read, but I didn't read very many worthwhile things. People now are too young to remember Tom Swift, or to remember Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those are the kinds of things that I read growing up. I couldn't get enough of them, and I can remember the marvelous stories that were in The Saturday Evening Post. I couldn't wait for it to come every week, so we could read the fiction story that was in there or the novel that was in there. Sometimes it was continued from week to week, other times it was in one issue. So I read, and I read newspapers. When I was 12, 13, 14 years old, I read the paper regularly. Today, I guess I read four papers a day, maybe five or six. That comes from a habit of my early youth of enjoying reading current stories. I never was as interested in history as many of my friends, but I was always more interested in the current than they were. So you can have chocolate or vanilla; I chose one flavor.
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Hilary Swank
Two Oscars for Best Actress
Hilary Swank: School was the place that I would go where -- the kids whose parents didn't want them to play with me -- it was just an extension of that. Unfortunately, it was a place where I didn't necessarily feel like I belonged. I had a couple of wonderful teachers. My fifth grade teacher was also a big influence in my career because he had us write a skit in front of the class and perform it in front of the class, and in that moment, now I realize, I found what we call our calling. At the time, I had no idea, but I knew that something came alive inside of me and that I was doing something that I loved tremendously.
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
I was in a school in the third grade and they were thinking of skipping me, putting me in a higher grade. But then somebody said that would be bad psychologically. So, for that entire year, because I had learned all the lessons that year -- the multiplication tables, whatever the reading was -- this teacher let me go off by myself and draw pictures. So I had hours and hours of time where I was just left to my own devices, drawing pictures. And she would encourage me. That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
I've learned that achievement is a sense, what -- more importantly -- is a sense of oneself and that it's never a feeling of self-satisfaction. That the people who have achieved more probably are those who always say, "I don't deserve this." Because they were doing exactly what they loved to do, and what ended up being quite helpful, maybe, to other people. But not seeking approval, not trying to follow the ordinary way of doing things, the expected way of doing things, the accepted way of doing things. They are not aversive in their actions and, yet they know how to ruffle the system and make better things happen, not for self-importance but for larger reasons.
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