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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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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
I found myself during the days seeing patients and during the nights going to the lab and trying to do a little bit of research. And, I found at night I was really happy. I felt stimulated. I couldn't wait to get to the lab at night so I could start experiments. I found them very intellectually challenging, and I liked playing with the toys. And at that point, I decided that this is what I enjoy doing best. And, this is probably the best way to be able to ensure, if I am going to make a contribution, that I will, by spending all my time doing one thing, research, rather than trying to treat patients and also do research. Those were the two events that most clearly shaped my future.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
We had the Soviet troops stationed in Poland for 50 years, over 200,000 soldiers based permanently on the territory of Poland. So, people would end up in prisons for some time, very often, they would be beaten up by the police. There were not so many people who would claim to be very courageous. Then again, you have people of different characters. Some are really put off by the hardships, by the difficulties, whereas the others actually strengthen. I was among the latter, who became stronger due to the hardships, and I got involved in my struggle with much more determination.
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