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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
Stephen Sondheim: It was a long afternoon. Well, it was probably two and a half hours, but the packed information I got in makes it seem longer. And you know, at that age you're a sponge, you just absorb everything. And he (Oscar Hammerstein) gave me the distillation of 30 years of experience. Now, not all in that afternoon, because then he set up a course for me, so to speak. He said, "If you want to learn to write musicals, why don't you take a good play, one that you like, and make it into a musical? And then, after you've done that, then take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then take a story, not one that you've written, but that is not in the dramatic form, like a novel or something like that, make it into a musical. And then make up your own story and make it into a musical." He said, by the time you get all those four done, you'll know something. And that's exactly what I did.
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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
When I was 17, it was their third show. They'd written Oklahoma! and Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Oscar asked me if I'd like to work on it, because they were rehearsing over the summer, which was between college terms for me. So that's exactly what I did. I was a gopher. You know, fetched coffee and typed script. And he just wanted me to inculcate myself. And I learned a great deal watching because, particularly, the show was highly experimental and it was a failure. And both those things were very important to me, because one of the things I learned was to be brave, and the other thing, not to expect that everything's going to come out perfectly.
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Martha Stewart
Multi-Media Lifestyle Entrepreneur
I really found that I was drawn to what I call my mentors. I have developed over the years a whole group of important people, people important to me that I consider mentors. Now, they may be the gardener in the estate down the road. They may be a farmer who milks his cows. They may be a very special professor. All different kinds of people fall into this group of what I call my mentors. It may be someone I've never met, but only read, like Garcia Marquez. One of my dreams is to meet him. But those are my mentors. George Eliot, the great novelist. Jane Austen is a mentor of mine, in terms of language. So, I've informally constructed this structure in my life of mentors.
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Martha Stewart
Multi-Media Lifestyle Entrepreneur
We had a lot of chores at our house, a tremendous number of chores, but we were always granted the time to read. And I had a reading chair that I sat in and read in. I also had a favorite tree that I sat in and read in. It sounds a little idyllic, sort of Mark Twainish, but it was true. I would find a quiet place. On Sunday mornings, because we had such chaos around our house, everybody running and getting dressed to go to church and everything, I sat in the car and read. I read everything. I read from A to Z in the Stockton Room. I just started on the As and went all the way through.
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James Stockdale
Congressional Medal of Honor
I could fly over South Vietnam the year before and see all the little skirmishes going on, including sometimes American soldiers and marines, and flying American airplanes, but they were really "noncombatants." I could see all of this thing. I said, "Listen, if we come over here, we're supposed to be up here looking for MIGs. They're not going to fly a MIG down here over South Vietnam, and it's just foolish because they don't have enough planes to do what you do if you wanted to get involved in one of these hassles." You could see three wars going on at almost any time below you. You would see lines of firing men firing at each other. You go 50 or 100 miles on and there's another one going on. South Vietnam was alive with ammunition expenditure.
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