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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
Later on, when I was trying to justify having an academic education, and wanting to apply the performance gift, whatever it was -- then I did study. I did think very carefully about the role of the director. I read a great deal of director's memoirs. I read a book by Tyrone Guthrie that hugely influenced me, inspired me. And, I have done ever since because I really enjoy discovering how other people deal with the contradictions. The thing is, there is very little formal training for being a theatre director. There's a little bit more for being a movie director. There are film schools. Most theatre studies places don't actually accommodate directors or have a program for them. Certainly not in England they don't. In a way, I sympathize with that because there is something unteachable about it. Really, what you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to anything. It's to do with listening. It's to do with humility and a sense of yourself.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
The first theater that I went to was a vaudeville house, and the great experience was hearing the band striking up. I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera. I've never wanted to categorize them, or to feel that they should be done by different people, different specialists. I've never believed in that. So, when I was at university, I suppose this was expressed through the fact that there were two famous societies at Cambridge. One of them was called the Marlowe Society that did all the classical plays. And the other was called the Footlights, and they did the musicals and the revues. And in my last term at Cambridge I did both productions. I did the Marlowe Society and the Footlights. I directed both of them.
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Joyce Carol Oates
National Book Award
I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families. Because older people in our families have so much to tell, and you just have to sort of inspire them and they start telling you. So to be very curious, and to take a kind of neutral position and not to be judgmental, just kind of open. You know, look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.
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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
Pierre Omidyar: That was my professional debut. Six bucks an hour. And it's funny too, thinking about it, because it was using computer technology to print out library cards for the card catalogue. And so all it was, was a program to just format. You know, somebody would type in the information and it would format it the way the librarian wanted, so they could put the cards into the card catalogue. So this is incredibly basic computer technology. This is no database there. No search engine, nothing like that. But yeah, six dollars an hour. And also, at that time I also worked on the software to help schedule classes, which was key. This was in high school at tenth or 11th grade, I think, when I was working on that, and I resisted the temptation to put in some code in there to make sure I never had classes on Friday, because I wouldn't have been able to get away with it, but I thought about it.
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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
Pierre Omidyar: When I was in college I taught myself how to program the Macintosh. A big foundation actually for that was a class. It was actually -- so it wasn't completely self-taught -- it was a C programming class called "Data Structures." It was the big kind of the "weed-out" class for the computer science program. I learned how to program C. A great, great professor. Probably one of the best I've ever had, and a couple of things stem from that story. The first is that that professor eventually had to leave the school. He was a great teacher but apparently he had never published anything, and so they axed him. He had to leave and that was a scandal, at least in my mind. So I don't know what exactly that taught me, but it did have an impact on me and -- yeah. And then second, you know, I learned how to program C, and then I used that ability to teach myself how to program the Macintosh which I was just very excited about learning everything I could about it. And of course, that's how I began actually my professional career was after college -- actually a year before graduating from college -- I took a summer job in California working at a software company for the Macintosh.
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