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Oprah Winfrey
Entertainment Executive
Oprah Winfrey: Well, the most powerful scene in The Color Purple for me was the scene where Sofia walks through the cornfield, and proclaims herself to Celia, defines and proclaims herself. Where she says, "All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my cousins. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my uncles. But I ain't never thought I had to fight my own house." I did that scene in one take because it was the essence, I thought, of my life, and very liberating to live it through Sofia. Because, at the time that I spoke it, I wasn't there yet. Because, what she is saying is "I fought people all my life, and I'm not going to fight in my own house anymore, in my own space anymore. I'm going to have what I deserve." And it's taken me a while to get to where Sofia was. But it was so liberating. It was all, I think, a part of the process of growth for me, to recognize it can be done.
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Oprah Winfrey
Entertainment Executive
Oprah Winfrey: I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity. The reason I feel so strongly about that, and it's not just a saying for me. I was hired in television in 1973, right after the riots of '71, '72, and other blacks and female people were hired at the same time. People accused me of being a token at the time. It didn't really bother me because I realized that I was going to stay there. Once I got there, I realized, nobody is getting me out of here. This is not just a phase for me. I sort of began to create my own luck. I said I knew how to edit when I didn't. I said I knew how to report on stories. I went to my first city council meeting, I wasn't quite sure of what to do, but I had told the news director that I did. So, then what you have to do is, be willing to admit that you know nothing. So I walked into the city council meeting and announced to everybody there, "This is my first day on the job, and I don't know anything. Please help me because I have told the news director at Channel 5 that I know what I'm doing. Pleeeeze help me." And they did. And from that point on all those councilmen became my friends, and I'd come in the council meeting, and they helped me out. And I realize now it was because of my willingness to say, "I don't know it, but if you will just, you know, help me." So that's how I learned.
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Bob Woodward
Investigative Reporter
Bob Woodward: I don't know whether I feel pride. I think pride is hubris. I think it is an emotion that if you bask in it, it's like hate; it will destroy you. So I don't make those kinds of assessments. I like what I do. I am repeatedly struck by how I have missed part of the story, always. One of the managing editors at the Post, Howard Simons, during Watergate -- this was not on a Watergate story, but I was struggling with a story early in my time at the Post -- and he came by, and he said, "You don't have to understand a man in an afternoon." In other words, you don't have to do it in a day, and you won't achieve understanding of a in an -- slow down, take your time, dig, go back. And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me.
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Bob Woodward
Investigative Reporter
I think journalism is a practice, like law, that you keep learning. You are trying to get it right and you never do, and that there must be a sense whenever you get to something and then realize two weeks earlier, two days or two minutes earlier, you didn't know that, and it's critical that no matter what you do, you are never going to have the full story. So you are dealing a glancing blow to what's out there. You want to deal a careful glancing blow. You want to spend time on it. You want to make sense out of it. You want it to be fair. But in the end, it's only a glancing blow.
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Chuck Yeager
First Man to Break the Sound Barrier
Chuck Yeager: The X-1, to me, was a sort of a "fly twice a week" airplane. It took two or three days to reduce the data from your flight. It was a complex airplane that gets serviced with liquid oxygen and alcohol and gaseous nitrogen. And in the meantime, I'm flying about 15 other airplanes every day, on different test programs, so it was a hard grind. The X-1 was a pleasure to fly, because you took the whole day to do it. That particular flight, I think was on a Tuesday. On the weekends, there at Muroc, as it was called then, we used to go out to Pancho Barnes's. She had a rodeo grounds, swimming pool, motel and a good restaurant. You'd go out there and unwind. And I took Glennis out there, I think, on a Saturday night. We loved to ride horses, so we went out after dinner and were riding horses and chasing each other. Coming back, somebody closed a gate, it was dark and I didn't see it, so my horse hit the fence and flipped me, and I broke a couple of ribs. And that was on a Saturday night. Sunday I moped around, and then Monday, I had to go into the base and I went to a local doctor there, and he said, "You've got two busted ribs. I'll tape you up." And it really didn't make that much difference in flying the airplane, because it's not strenuous other than handling it with your hands and feet on the rudder pedals and the control surfaces and the loading pressure domes and turning switches on, and things like that. So my only problem was, it was painful to get into the airplane, because you had to come down a ladder and go through a little hole on the right side. But then the hard part was closing the door once old Jack Ridley came down the ladder and held the door against the right side. You had a lever. It took both hands all you could do it. I couldn't handle it with my right side, so he made me about a ten-inch long broom stick that I could stick in the end of the door handle to give me that mechanical advantage. That's the way we solved the problem. So that really didn't make much difference.
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Chuck Yeager
First Man to Break the Sound Barrier
I didn't go straight back to my squadron when I got to Spain. I was held in sort of a secure house, where you couldn't get out, until they interrogated you to make sure you were an American flyer. You know, they wanted your whole story. Where you got shot down, the outfit that you were with, and then they brought a pilot down from my squadron to identify me, and to make sure that I was who I said I was. Then they started publishing orders on me to go back to the United States. That's when I sort of backed off and said, "I don't want to go home, I want to go back to my squadron and fight." And they said, "You can't because the rules prohibit it." Fortunately, the invasion was just coming along, and when the invasion occurred, the resistance forces surfaced, and General Eisenhower, whom I had worked my way all the way up to see, said, "Okay, go back."
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