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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
What I tried to do all through college and graduate school was to go to Washington every summer, so that I could have an actual experience of government. I knew I was interested in American history and government, so I thought, instead of just reading about it I'd better find out about it in practical terms. So one summer I worked in the House of Representatives; another summer I worked in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and another summer I worked in the State Department. And then eventually I became a White House fellow and worked for Lyndon Johnson. And that probably was the single most important experience in orienting me to want to do presidential history, because I got to know this crazy character when I was only 23 years old.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
When I look at Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, I think the most important quality he had during the Depression and the war was this absolute confidence in himself, in his country, really in the American people. He was able to exude that confidence and almost project it. So when the people in the country heard him speak in these fireside chats, they said, "Yeah, it's going to be okay. We'll get through this depression," or "We'll win this war." I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along. So I would say energy, vitality, confidence, being willing to take risks at certain times if it's something you believe in. That's probably the hardest thing you have to figure out, and that's where courage comes in. I think in the long run, these qualities somehow all meld together in a way that it's hard to speak about them separately
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
Do research. Even if you're writing the college essay in some ways, you can do a little bit of research to bring it to life. You can't just expect it all to come from your head. I think the mistaken idea that we have about writing is that somebody sits by a lake and they look at the clouds. There are poets who can do that, who generate their own thoughts with nothing other than what's in their head. Ninety-nine percent of the rest of the writing is from work you build up. When I do research, I have done -- 90 percent of my time is the research, the other ten percent is the writing. So I don't have to face a blank piece of paper. I can look at this as a quote that I have from somewhere. This is an interview that I'm going to take from that. So it's not as scary as having to have it come from your head. So I think the most important thing I would tell kids is, "Don't think of it as something that has to come from your head."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Whenever I start a book, I make a very long outline. Not so much A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, 4, but really paragraph outline of the episodes that I want to cover in the book. And it's before I know a lot. When I do that, it is what I, as a layperson, would want to know about, say, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Then what happens is, you get so deep into it, that after a while you're off on a million tangents. And I always go back to the outline, because what it was in the outline, that I wanted to know as a layperson, is what the lay reader is probably going to want to know too. So it's a nice reminder to yourself, if you're getting so deep into something that really the reader is not going to care about at all.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
After the university, in 1955, I became a professional politician, and in just 15 years I was already a member of the Central Committee and the head of a large region, the equivalent of a governor. I governed this large region for almost nine years. And, evidently I distinguished myself in some way so that they invited me to come to work for Brezhnev in the Politburo, the Central Committee. So I found myself at that place at the time when society was growing ripe for -- or really, had already given rise to -- the desire and the expectation for change. Especially since this occurred during a three year period when we lost three General Secretaries, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. The whole country was simply in some kind of -- What would you call it when the country is being ruled by old men who keep dropping dead, and the country is left without normal leadership? This was the mood in society. Plus the experience that I already had. After all, I had worked for seven years in the Politburo before I got to be General Secretary. Without that it would be unlikely that I would have gotten to be the head of a country like ours.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
I was relatively young, the youngest of the lot, actually, and I was a man with a modern education who already had a great deal of experience working independently. At the beginning, that was important, that was significant. Also, the fact that I was given the post of General Secretary, tantamount to being a Tsar, and did not get drunk on my own power, but instead began to transform it. That already was the result of my democratic convictions. I had had them ever since I was young, and they became my defining characteristic, my credo: devotion to democracy, respect for the worth of the individual. But the system had suppressed all that; it did not allow an individual the freedom to actualize himself. I did not accept this.
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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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