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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
It gave us three full years to do anything we wanted. So in effect, what I said when I got it -- it was a glorious opportunity, 1953, I was 24 -- I said, "Do anything! Go anywhere!" and immediately I was off to the tropics, which is where I always wanted to go, to luxuriate in the maximum diversity centers of the world, fauna and flora. Sort of like an art student, a scholar of art history, being allowed to visit the great museums for the first time. So off I went to Cuba and Mexico, and spent time working in the rainforest, becoming familiar with the biology of the fauna and flora, and particularly the ants. Then immediately afterward, after passing through Harvard and shaking some hands and collecting checks, I headed for the South Pacific.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
I saw what I could succeed in. I never considered myself very bright, and I always thought of myself as mathematically mediocre. So I figured that probably, like your college runner who has difficulty breaking a ten-second hundred -- well, breaking an 11-second, shall we say, 100-meter -- realizes that their best shot is to rely less on strength and speed and more on self-discipline, planning, and long hard work. Yes. That's the way I do science.
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Oprah Winfrey
Entertainment Executive
Oprah Winfrey: Well, I loved books so much as a child. They were my outlet to the world. And I still do. People ask me, "What do you do in your spare time?" That's what I do -- I read. There are so many books. I went through a period of Lois Lenski books. She wrote Strawberry Girl, and lots of stories about these little peasant children. I went through a period where I wanted to be them. I would read the character, and whichever book I was reading, that's who I wanted to be that week. I read a book in the third grade about Katie John, who hated boys, and she had freckles. Well Lord knows, I'm not going to have freckles, no way, no how. But I tried to put some on. And I went through my "Katie John" phase. I think the book that moved me most growing up was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I had a tree in my backyard, too, so I identified with her. I just thought, "Well, this is my life." And then I discovered Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Well, first of all, it was the first time I had ever encountered another woman who had been sexually abused. I couldn't imagine, couldn't imagine. I felt that way, too, when I read The Color Purple. I read the first page of The Color Purple, put the book down, and wept. I could not believe it, that someone had put this in writing. It was unbelievable.
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Oprah Winfrey
Entertainment Executive
I thought of The Color Purple for myself. I know this is going to sound strange to you. I read the book. I got so many copies of that book. I passed the book around the everybody I knew. If I was on the bus, I'd pass it out to people. And when I heard that there was going to be a movie, I started talking it up for myself. I didn't know Quincy Jones or Steven Spielberg, or how on earth I would get in this movie. I'd never acted in my life. But I felt it so intensely that I had to be a part of that movie. I really do believe that I created it for myself. I wanted it more than anything in the world, and would have done anything to do it, anything to do it.
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Oprah Winfrey
Entertainment Executive
What I know is, is that if you do work that you love and work the fulfills you, the rest will come. And that, I truly believe that the reason I've been able to be so financially successful is because my focus has never, ever for one minute been money. And the fact that the money has come has really surprised me. I've been just really surprised and delighted and very pleased, and at many times overwhelmed by it. But the money has never been the focus. You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it. And I would do this job, and take on a second job to make ends meet if nobody paid me. Just for the opportunity to do it. That's how you know you are doing the right thing.
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Tom Wolfe
America's Master Novelist
In high school, there was a course in the sophomore year of high school in rhetoric. And I'm talking about rigorous rhetoric: the use of figures of speech, figura sententiae, and tropes, and all these technical names, and training in the three or four ways that you can arrange a paragraph. I don't think any of this happens any longer. Parsing sentences, which is a fading art. These diagrams of sentences, so you find out how all the different parts fit together. This was amazingly good training. Then in college, I went to Washington and Lee in Virginia, there was a young professor -- it never dawned on me 'til later that he was probably only four or five years older than me -- who had come to Washington and Lee from the American Studies program at Yale. That's where he had gotten his doctorate. And this course was so exciting that I was determined to do what he had done, which was to go to Yale in American Studies, which I did.
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