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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
Gore Vidal: My father was a great influence. He was a real jock. He was an all-American football player, a quarterback at West Point, part of the great winning team of 1917. He was captain of the team. I was the mascot. They lost the game to Navy. Nobody's perfect. But his character was a great stimulus to me. Athletes who do everything easily -- and he got a silver medal for the decathlon at the Olympic games in Antwerp in 1924 -- great athletes are very serene. They have to be. I remember he said -- he wasn't talking to me because I was not interested in athletics -- but he was talking to somebody, and he said, "Well, never look back." In other words, if you've missed a shot at tennis, never think about it again, go right on to the next one. And this was terribly good advice about life's hazardous ways, so I took that seriously.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
Most things don't work, either because the idea was wrong -- the connection was wrong -- or because of execution. Trying to prove that the idea was right is very difficult. And the combination of those two things almost guarantees that somewhere between 90 and 99 percent of experiments will fail. And in order to cope with that, you need a sense of humor. You need to understand that, yeah, it didn't work, but there's got to be something good that came out of it. You must have learned something, or there's got to be something funny about how it didn't work, or something that we can be happy about that will stimulate us to try it again the next day.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
Lech Walesa: It is true that I was in trouble many times. But as I said, I was quite a lively child, and I had my own mind. And, even if I saw things look differently that wouldn't change my mind. And, I even got involved and set up a conflict with the priest. I believe it may have been when I was around ten. I can't remember what it actually boiled down to. But, the point was that I was right, not him. And in fact, I followed him for like a fortnight and kept repeating that I'm right not him, and finally he had to give in, and then he said to me the following: "Well, my boy, you will either reach very, very far or you will end up in jail." And the truth is, I sampled both in my life.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
Lech Walesa: I was fired on several occasions, because really, I got involved in the struggle with more and more determination, and I believe we can already quote the date 1970 as the date of my determined struggle. I was already the leader of the strike then. It was a very inefficient leadership on my part, and we failed with our strike in 1970, but that defeat caused my character -- due to my character I spent the next ten years trying to work out the method that would actually bring about the victory. And when, ten years later, we had another opportunity, I already knew how to go about it, how to deal with it, and I led the struggle the way -- as it should be.
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