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Edward Albee
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Edward Albee: I don't rewrite. Well, not much. I think I probably do all the rewriting that I'm going to do before I'm aware that I'm writing the play because obviously, the creativity resists -- resides -- in the unconscious, right? Probably resists the unconscious, too -- resides in the unconscious. My plays, I think, are pretty much determined before I become aware of them. I think they formulated there, and then they move into the conscious mind, and then onto the page. By the time I'm willing to commit a play to paper, I pretty much know -- or can trust -- the characters to write the play for me. So, I don't impose. I let them have their heads and say and do what they want, and it turns out to be a play.
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Tenley Albright
Olympic Gold Medal Figure Skater
Tenley Albright: It was about four o'clock in the morning. I had discovered that there were two rinks in Boston where, if they hadn't sold the ice for hockey for the next morning, if I called after ten o'clock at night, they'd let me use the ice and have it all to myself until the hockey game or hockey practice started. So I did that one morning. I carried my own phonograph and my skates, and it was snowing, and I unlocked the back door of the rink. But just before I did, actually, my feet slipped out from under me, flew up in the air. I fell down, all my things around me, burst out laughing and realized there wasn't a soul around. It was very, very quiet. But I had the ice all to myself that morning. I had been shown where to put the lights on. I could play the music as loud as I wanted, as many times as I wanted.
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Stephen Ambrose
Biographer and Historian
It's a sad thing in America today, that kids don't get Latin anymore. I did four years of high school Latin. Now I can't remember very much of it and I certainly can't do Latin; but boy, I'll tell you, that helped me as a writer. And where it helps most of all is with verbs. Language turns on the verbs, and you learn that in Latin, and you learn the strength of verbs in Latin, and it was a great thing, in this little tiny high school -- 300 students -- in the rural Midwest farming community, we had a Latin teacher, full-time Latin teacher. That's all she did. And four years of Latin in high school is a great thing.
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Stephen Ambrose
Biographer and Historian
I was taught as a graduate student, by my professor, that a good sentence is like a good play. You start off with where and when. Where are we at and what's the time? And then you have the action of the thing, and then you have your climax, and that verb is the action and that's what carries the whole story, and everything in the sentence has to balance on that verb. And if you've got the wrong verb, your sentence isn't going to work. If you've got the right verb, you can-- the adjectives don't really matter much anymore. The verb is the action, and that's what's so great about Latin.
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Stephen Ambrose
Biographer and Historian
You learn what the gaps in your knowledge are by starting to tell the story. So the act of writing becomes the act of learning, and "Whoa! I can't tell this story unless I find out." I'm currently working on a book on the building of the transcontinental railroad, and I'm in a research stage now. I have been for about six months, and I'm dying to start writing about it, but I know I don't know enough yet. And once I start writing, I'm going to learn how much more I don't know, that I'm going to have to learn in order to make it understandable to my readers, so that the writing guides the research. I think a big mistake that a lot of young writers make who are doing nonfiction is you complete the research and then you sit down and write the book, and it's not like that. There's got to be a flow between, and the writing guiding the research, or at least for me. That's the only way I can do it.
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