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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
Charles Townes: I like to try to understand things. You know, that's a very great human drive, curiosity. What is this world here for? What's it doing? What makes it work? How does it work? It's like solving puzzles. But they're interesting puzzles, in that once you find out something new, in science, then it's the possession of everybody. And everybody else then builds on that. So you're not just solving some puzzle that everybody else has solved once, and then you tear it apart and it has to be solved again. In science, you solve a puzzle, understand something new, and it's exhilarating, and it's everybody's property then, which everybody can use. So it's a permanent contribution.
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
We had pets. I would raise animals. I would catch wildlife and raise them. I did carpentry. I also did some electronics and I collected stamps. Classification and understanding things was a great hobby of mine. In almost anything, I would sort of try to identify and collect and try to make work. When one of my cousins, who is an engineer, gave me an old radio set, that was just a great thing. And we'd tinker with the radio set, and made it work. My father used to bring home some broken clocks from a store of a friend he knew, a clockmaker, and we'd have broken clocks. And then we would play with them, and fix them and use the wheels and so on. So I enjoyed building things and making things.
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
I liked mathematics. I liked biology. I didn't like chemistry quite as much, because it was -- at that time I was taught a kind of cookbook type of chemistry, not the exciting chemistry which is current today. But physics had so much logic in it. Such firm, demanding logic. One could really figure things out. That particularly attracted me. But I liked the other sciences too. However, at some point I had to decide. Actually, I didn't decide until fairly late. The first course of physics I took was as a sophomore in college. And it was only the end of that year that I decided, "Yes, physics really is what I think I really want to do." I would have been very happy in biology or some other sciences too, I'm sure.
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
Charles Townes: What I particularly liked about physics was the tight logic. That you could look at something, and if you figured it out correctly, thought about it carefully, you could be pretty sure. "Yes, this is right," or something else isn't right. Lots of new things to explore, but they were explored through logic, experimentation, but experimentation based on certain logical ideas. So it was the firmness and the definiteness which one could decide what really is right, I think, that attracted me. Plus the fact that it was dealing with what I thought were important ideas. Mathematics appealed to me, and I enjoyed mathematics, but I preferred to do something that involved the real world around me. Real objects, like physics. Even though that also involved mathematics, it was dealing with a sort of real life a little bit more, I felt, than mathematics.
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
Charles Townes: People tell me that I work hard. I never feel that I do particularly, because it's fun. I always say, "Well, I've never worked hard in my life." I'm busy, but most of what I do is enjoyable. It isn't that it's not tedious to some people, and so on, and of course I have routine to do, but I don't mind it. I just don't feel that I'm put upon. I spend a lot of time, but it's fun. It's a very intensive hobby. I would say it's my most serious hobby. I have lots of hobbies, but the one permanent one is science, physics. So yes, I spend a lot of time, and I would agree with Edison, you have to work very hard and intensively. But it's not what the ordinary person calls work to me. It's really interesting, fun, enjoyable, exciting to be thinking about these things.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: What is rewarding about the priesthood is, one, that you have an incredible privilege of being privy to some of the most extraordinary things about people. I mean, as their parish priest, you visit people who are sick, say, on their death bed and they tell you things that they probably have not shared with any other person. You are privileged to bring the Holy Sacrament to people at a time when they are probably at their lowest. But you also have the privilege of meeting up with people at their moment of great joy, when they are getting married, or when they have a child baptized. And you know, you are given the privilege of connecting people, as it were. Connecting people with the transcendent, connecting people with their God. And in many ways, each one of us, of course, is expected to be an icon, an image of that which is invisible, an image of God, each one of us because we each have been created in the image of God. So people actually, if they want to know, "What is God like?" they would have to look at you and me and see us as being compassionate, because God is compassionate, as being loving, because God is loving. God is invisible. People wouldn't know about God except through those who are God's representatives, you and I and all of us.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: I loved Agatha Christie, of course. And also, an American team called Ellery Queen. I read a lot of Ellery Queen. Erle Stanley Gardner. I must have read 40 books by Erle Stanley Gardner before I was 15 or so. So, I got the reading habit, and I slightly branched out, you know, and challenged myself. I remember at the age of 15 going into the library and pulling down The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and reading it because I had heard that this was a modern masterpiece. So, it was random reading, but maybe that's the best kind in a way. It's not forced on you and you get these glimpses, you know, of a wonderful world of books. In Reading there was a lovely Carnegie-endowed library with walls of books, and I remember I read through a whole shelf of P.G. Wodehouse. Again my taste was to humor, I think, and it's odd that I didn't become a humorist really, although -- just some humor perhaps in my work -- but my first ambition as a writer was to become a humorous writer, to be like Thurber and Benchley and the lighter E.B. White, you know, to make people laugh. I thought that was a harmless thing to do. A thing that society never could have too much of, laughter. Anyway, I did a lot of reading. I remember I used to lie on this old sofa with a box of raisins, and I'd read as many as two books in one afternoon and eat maybe -- I hope not the whole box -- but a fair amount of the box of raisins. That was my diet for a while.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
To the young writers, I would merely say, "Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour say -- or more -- a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. Henry Greene, one of my pets, was an industrialist actually. He was running a company, and he would come home and write for just an hour in an armchair, and wonderful books were created in this way. So, take it seriously, you know, just set a quota. Try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere. Try to think of getting into print. Don't be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won't run your stuff. We're still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it's not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience. "Read what excites you," would be advice, and even if you don't imitate it you will learn from it. All those mystery novels I read I think did give me some lesson about keeping a plot taut, trying to move forward or make the reader feel that kind of a tension is being achieved, a string is being pulled tight. Other than that, don't try to get rich on the other hand. If you want to get rich, you should go into investment banking or being a certain kind of a lawyer. But, on the other hand, I would like to think that in a country this large -- and a language even larger -- that there ought to be a living in it for somebody who cares, and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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