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Ron Howard
Oscar for Best Director
My first movie was a car chase comedy -- young people on the run -- called Grand Theft Auto . And made for $602,000, but the film made a terrific profit and it got me started. I wrote it with my father, and I had to star in it in order to get to direct it. But that's the last time that I acted in anything that I directed. Well, I actually had to do a scene in the next film that I directed, but I didn't like it and I cut the scene out. And the executives in charge of the project, fortunately, liked the movie well enough that they accepted the fact that I cut myself out of the movie. That was the last time that I acted in anything that I've directed.
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John Irving
National Book Award
At the time, they didn't have the language for it that we have perhaps an over-abundance of today. Dyslexia, learning disabilities, whatever they are. I had something of that nature and never knew I had it until one of my children was diagnosed as being slightly dyslexic, and when they showed me the results of how they determined that he had a learning disability, I realized that they were describing exactly what I had always done. What it amounted to, in essence, was that I would ask my friends, "How long did the history assignment take you? How long did the English assignment take you?" And if they said, "Oh, it's 45 minutes," I would just double the time, or triple the time, and I'd say, "Well, it's an hour and a half for me." I just knew that everything was going to take me longer. Right?
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John Irving
National Book Award
So much of a sport like wrestling is drilling, is just repeating and repeating and repeating, so that you've done this thing so many times that if somebody just touches your arm on that side, you know where to go. You could do it with your eyes closed. If you're off your feet and you're up in the air, if you've been there enough, you know where the mat is. You know it's here, it's not there. You just know where it is. You don't have to see it, but you've been through that position enough so that you're not looking for the mat. You're not thinking, "Is it up here? Is it down there? Am I going to land on my head? Am I going to land on my tail?" You know? I think sentences are like that. If you're comfortable enough with all kinds of sentences, with verbs and their gerundive, with active verbs, with short sentences, with long sentences, you know how to put them together. You know how to slow the reader down when the reader is at a place where you want the reader to move slowly, and you know how to speed the reader up when you're at a place in the story where you want the reader to go fast. And it's drilling, it's repetition. Most people would find it boring, like sit-ups, you know? Like skipping rope. But I always had -- I could put my mind somewhere else while I skipped rope for 45 minutes. You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else. You have to imagine that your next opponent stopped skipping rope 15 minutes ago. Then you keep going.
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