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Hilary Swank
Two Oscars for Best Actress
I trained for five hours a day, two-and-a-half hours in boxing, and then -- it was between four and five hours a day -- two-and-a-half hours of boxing every day, six days a week, and an hour and a half of weight training, to two hours. I needed to eat 210 grams of protein a day, and your body can't assimilate a lot of protein, so I had to eat every hour and a half, and I was a vegetarian. I ate fish at that time, but I didn't eat red meat or anything that could help me. So a lot of my diet was egg whites. I had to eat 60 egg whites in a day. I don't know if you've ever even tried to eat five egg whites. It's fine and everything, but I just couldn't eat that many. So I would just drink them. I would drink flax oil. I would drink protein shakes, but I also needed a lot of sleep at night because my body was going through this change, but I couldn't go to sleep without waking up and eating. So I would wake up, and I would drink my protein shakes, too.
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Hilary Swank
Two Oscars for Best Actress
I didn't have an Ivy League education. I didn't have a head shot. I didn't have training, formal acting training. I just had my mom who believed in me and who instilled a wonderful work ethic and belief. So I'm really grateful for that. In the years between now and then, I have recognized the importance of learning my craft and wanting to go deeper and never wanting to rest on my laurels and what I've achieved, and I believe that learning is one of the most important things in life. I take classes when I can, not only in acting, but any other thing that I can. I'm learning Italian. I read. Anything that has to do with life is only going to help me as an actor. So, any way that I can travel and learn more, I take that when I can.
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
Amy Tan: I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic. It's very gothic to have a little boy killing a giant, somebody's head being served on a platter, dead people being raised out of the grave, things like that. Also, because the rhythms, the prose style of the Bible is, of course, very influential, has been very influential on many writers. So as stories, I loved fairy tales. Anything that had a degree of the fantastic. I suppose what some people would call today "magical realism."
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
There was a lot of storytelling going on in our house: family stories, gossip, what happened to the people left behind in China. The gossip about people's character that went around as my aunt and my mother shelled peas on the dining table covered with newspaper. Overhearing things being said in Chinese that I wasn't supposed to understand -- which is the only reason I understand some Shanghainese and Mandarin. And being told there were certain books I couldn't read, which made me go out deliberately and find those books.
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Julie Taymor
Theater, Opera and Film Director
I met a Noh mask carver in Kyoto, and I was very impressed, when I went into his workshop, how he laid out his tools, how he laid out the wood and the carving tools, and the neatness, so that the act -- the sheer act of carving -- was an act of devotion. And you didn't go into just a messy studio and just slap-dash something together. The making of the mask, or the making of the puppet in Indonesia, the carving of the leather shadow puppet, is such a high art form that -- a wooden mask, you have to hold the head to north, and the south would be the bottom. How you put the masks in a box, how you treat them -- they are not merchandise. They are not just inanimate objects.
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Julie Taymor
Theater, Opera and Film Director
When people are there, and they're committed -- whether they're a performer who says, "I'm going to take the next 10 hours to put on my costume, it will take me that long, and as I do, I will eat this food and I will cleanse my body," whether -- you know, if you're a dancer, a Kathakali dancer from India putting on that 40 pounds of fabric -- it transforms who you are so that you can stay up all night and dance for 20 hours. As a regular Joe, you can't do that.
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