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Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nadine Gordimer: I don't like this word "inspire." I think you have to find what wakes up what is latent in you. You may admire someone else, but to inspire suggests that you want to emulate them or be like them. You cannot be like anybody else, not even the great writer or the great actress that you happen to admire. I think that, again, I come back to books. My desire to understand life, to explore it, came through literature, through reading. And I always tell aspiring young writers, "Forget about creative writing classes." You can't teach people to write poetry or novels or short stories. You can teach them to be good journalists, that's another thing. But you cannot teach them literature this way. And the only way you can teach yourself is to read, read, read. Not in order to emulate or copy what you read, but to become self-critical, to look then at your own little efforts and think, "My God! Look what this one and that one can do with a word that I haven't even touched yet."
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Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize in Literature
I decided much later when I was about 19, and when I was already publishing here and there, and living at home and eating food provided by my father and so on, that I wanted to go to university. So I went to the University of Witwatersrand as an occasional student for one year, no degree, and then left. And of course it was interesting because it was just after the war, and there was this big division. I was like the people who had come back from the war, the soldiers, who then were, you know, adult, and in my case I found that I had read far more than either they had -- because they hadn't had the opportunity -- and also the younger ones who'd just come from school. So what they recommended reading, I had already done for my own pleasure and my own enlightenment. But what I did learn that year there was -- indeed through one good lecturer -- was to become, as I say, very self-critical. Not just to think that whatever I had written was just what I wanted to say, but to see how it could be critical that it didn't. I then began to see where I was failing.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
Probably the most important thing I did, if I were to cite one incident -- and this has nothing to do with paleontology in a direct sense, but in another way it has everything to do with career -- was singing in the All-City High School Chorus. I was always interested in choral singing, in fact I still sing. It was a total fluke. In fact, the chorus teacher made a mistake. There was this chorus which was composed of the best singers from all the high schools, and each public high school was allocated a few audition try-out passes, so to speak. My chorus director had two. I was in the junior chorus, the senior chorus had more. And he called my name by mistake -- there was one obvious person who got one of the tickets -- and I was very pleased. I went up to get the ticket and he suddenly realized he'd made a mistake, but being a sensitive man -- I've always been grateful for this -- he didn't embarrass me by saying, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean you." He just let it happen, he gave me the ticket. I went down, I tried out, I actually got in. I was by no means in the top half of this chorus, but the chorus was then led by a man named Peter Wilhousky, who was director of music for the City of New York, one of the great choral conductors of America. He was an old Polish or Russian aristocrat, and he just had a fierce belief in excellence. He was also tough as could be, and he'd throw people out at a moment's notice. He's not a nice man, I don't mean that. Niceness is not always what you want. I mean, you need a lot of it, but before I met Wilhousky I had just never even encountered the notion that genuine professional excellence was attainable by high school students. And yet he would settle for nothing else. We were the best singers in the high school system in the city, and we were damned well going to turn out a professional quality concert, which we gave each year in Carnegie Hall. He wasn't even going to consider anything else, he just didn't even talk about it. You were going to do that, and I'm going to do it all, that's all there was to it. And that was a very inspirational message. I don't know that my life would have been different. I think I had enough internal drive to do what I wanted to do, but to see that institutionalization of genuine excellence at age 15, 16, was very important to me. Now I got into that chorus by sheer good fortune, as I've told you the story. That's how lives work anyway.
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John Grisham
Best-Selling Author
I give commencement speeches occasionally to colleges and high schools, and I usually dwell on that, tell the students, "Get your education and work hard, but don't race toward the age of 22 or 23 when you're out of college, and you've got the credit card, and you've got the BMW, and you want everything right then at the age of 23, because you're not going to enjoy your education." I tell kids to stay in school until they're 30 years old. Their parents hate me for it, but nobody really takes you very seriously until you're 30 anyway. You need to spend a lot of time in school.
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John Grisham
Best-Selling Author
The basics of grammar and vocabulary are very important. And you tend to take it for granted, until you start trying to write. It is terribly important to read extensively. Virtually all writers I know are voracious readers still, and that is preparation. The more you read, the more you know. The more your imagination works, the more you read. And that's -- those are the tools of a good writer. You have to live. Nobody wants to hear -- the world does not want to hear -- a great novel from a 21 year-old. You've got to get a real job and get a real career, and you've got to go to work. And you've got to live and you've got to succeed and fail, and suffer, a little bit, or see suffering, heartache and heartbreak and all that before you really have anything to write.
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