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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
I think the extent to which I have any balance at all, any mental balance, is because of being a farm kid and being raised in those isolated rural areas. Even in Mississippi there was no immediate concern about social problems, you know. We were a feudal system of our own. Grandpa was a feudal lord, and we all did our work, you know. And there were 13 of us in the household. We were self-sufficient. My grandmother though, began to prepare us in her own neurotic -- and I think psychotic -- way to face racism. So, she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that. I was preparing myself for the theater, and I got a little job here and a job there, but it wasn't going well, and I considered some time before the mid-60s that maybe I should consider something else. And I went to NYU for some vocational testing, vocational guidance. And they found that I had a talent, perhaps, in architecture. So I applied to Pratt and Parsons for that kind of training. And I was prepared to say bye-bye to acting, go on to something else, and before I joined my fall classes, I got a job out in Indiana that set me back on the track of acting.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
So when a young man yesterday from Chapel Hill asked me -- you know, he said he's determined to be the best actor in the world -- "Where do I go?" He used the phrase "dream." He said, "I have a dream of being the best actor in the world." And I said, "If you can turn that dream to imaging, you can image yourself, imagine yourself, and then achieving it, being able to plumb the depths of human feeling as much as Marlon Brando's able to, and then on the other end, the technique. Find clarity and brilliance of language as much as Richard Burton did. Then you might be the best actor in the world." But it's doing real things. It's nothing about fantasy.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
I was 14 years old when Ray [Charles] came to town from Florida. He wanted to get away from Florida and he asked a friend of his -- because he had sight until he was seven -- to take a string from Florida and get him as far away from Florida as he could get and boy, Lord knows, that's Seattle! If you go any further you're in Alaska and Russia! So Ray showed up, and he was at 16 years old, and he was like -- God! You know! He had an apartment, he had a record player, he had a girlfriend, two or three suits. When I first met him, you know, he'd invite me over to his place. I couldn't believe it. He was fixing his record player. He'd shock himself because there were glass tubes in the back of the record player then, and the radio. And, I used to just sit around and say, "I can't believe you're 16 and you've got all this stuff going," because he was like he was 30 then. He was like a brilliant old dude, you know. He knew how to arrange and everything. And he used to -- taught me how to arrange in Braille, and the notes. He taught me what the notes were because he understood. He said, "A dotted eighth, a sixteenth, that's a quarter note," and so forth. And, I'd just struggle with it and just plowed through it.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
Quincy Jones: I guess 1947 we got our first job for seven dollars, and the year after that we played with Billie Holiday, you know, with the Bumps Blackwell - Charlie Taylor band, and our confidence was building, because we danced and we sang and we played all -- we played modern jazz, we played schottisches, pop music at the white tennis clubs: "Room Full of Roses," and "To Each His Own," and all those things. And, we played the black clubs at ten o'clock, and played rhythm and blues, and for strippers, and we'd do comedy and everything else. At 3:00 o'clock in the morning we'd go down to Jackson Street in the red light district and play be-bop free all night because that was really what we really wanted to play, like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy and all those people, and they'd come through town. And in the following year Bobby Tucker -- who was Billie Holiday's musical director -- came back, and he liked what we did evidently, and we played with Billy Eckstine, and then Cab Calloway came through and we opened for Cab Calloway. So, our confidence was very strong.
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Hamid Karzai
President of Afghanistan
We moved in on two motorbikes. We got a flat tire four times along the way on the highway. But the Taliban did not capture us. So we were lucky. God was with us surely. We moved into Kandahar City, the heartland of the Taliban, spent the night in a villager's house. He protected us. That was the first sign for me that people would help. The next morning, early morning, he came to me and said, "Hamid, what do you want to do?" I said, "I want to remove the Taliban." He said, "But how? What do you have? These two motorbikes and four people, with you. Three people?" I said, "No sure, not that. But there have been people I have been talking to for many years including yourself. Let's do something." He looked at me in disbelief and he went out and he came back. He said, "Look, I guess if you stayed a few more days in Kandahar the Taliban would capture you. So you'd better leave. Go to the central part of Afghanistan where possibly, if there's a war, where there are mountains. You can hide. You can organize a resistance."
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Hamid Karzai
President of Afghanistan
I had, in Afghan standards, a very well-to-do childhood. I had horses, huge houses, and my schools, but a very restricted childhood. We were not allowed too much of a luxury that other people my age had, in terms of association with other people. So in that way, we were -- I recognized when I went to India, when I mixed up with other students there, that I was very reserved, very, very reserved, and that was a handicap. I could not associate easily with people. But on the other hand, it had benefits of self-restraint and, you know, a level of respect to other people, trying to make sure that nobody was offended, and respect to others.
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