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Suzan-Lori Parks
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Usually, it's just like I can hear talking. Topdog was like -- I thought that if I looked up -- I didn't, as I was writing, because I wrote for three days, or 72 hours. People said, "Well, you wrote from this day to that," but it was like a three-day period. Wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, and I thought if I looked up, I would see someone pouring silver liquid into the back of my head. That's what it felt like. It was just like "I know."
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
We were hanging out at our house in Venice Beach, and I said to Paul, my husband, "I'm going to write " and I talked in this voice, which is funny, because maybe the nasal tone thing -- Oh, it gets kind of creepy! "I'm going to write a play a day, and I'm going to call it 365 Days/365 Plays. Wow!" Paul wears his sunglasses -- his shades -- all the time, 'cause he's a blues musician. He's sitting on the couch like this, and he goes, "Yeah, baby. That'd be cool," like that. I said, "I'm going to do this", and he said, "That'd be cool." There it began. I ran upstairs and started right then. It was the 13th of November 2003, I think, or maybe 2002. I can't remember. Anyway, 2002 or 2003. And I wrote a play a day. The first one was called Start Here.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
I was in a canoe with a friend, paddling along, and I said to the friend, I hollered up to the friend, "I'm going to write a play, a riff on The Scarlet Letter, and I'm going to call it Fucking A. Ha, ha, ha!" We laughed in the canoe. As we dragged the canoe back to shore, the idea had deeply hooked me, and I knew that I had to write a play, a riff on The Scarlet Letter called Fucking A. Funny enough, I hadn't read The Scarlet Letter yet. I hadn't yet read the book, I just knew the story. Went home, read the book, and that became the long process of writing a play called Fucking A.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
It was literally as if he walked into the room. Not the historical Lincoln. This other guy, this black guy who looked just like him walked into the room, sat down, and started telling me, "There was once a man who bore a strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln " and all I was doing was just writing down what he said. It was trippy. Yeah! So that was in 1994-ish, and then in 1999, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, Emily Morris, a wonderful dramaturg, and I said to her, "Oh, I know what I'm going to write about. Two brothers: Lincoln and Booth." Ba-dump-bump. Ha ha! We started laughing, just like the canoe, Fucking A. Ha, ha, ha. It's always a joke, not a funny joke, but a joke with a hook, and I was hooked. I was hooked by the great fisherman, and I went home and wrote it quickly, and it was like silver liquid in my head.
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Linus Pauling
Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace
As the years have gone by, starting quite early, I realized I tried to formulate a picture of the universe. In a sense, a theory of everything. Whenever I hear something new, I try to fit it into the picture that I have already formed of the universe. If it fits in, well and good, I don't need to worry about it. But, if it doesn't fit in, then I ask, "Why doesn't it fit in with my ideas about how the universe ought to be operating?" I'd better try to find the answer to that. So, then I can ask, "How well is my background of knowledge and experience, such that I have a reasonable chance of finding the answer?" And if it isn't, then I say, "Well, perhaps someone else will make some progress with that idea, but I better go on with the others." So, I have lots of ideas. I do a lot of scientific reading, and quite often, every week perhaps, I read about something that someone is reporting that puzzles me. So I have a big pile of questions of this sort that I would like to settle down to work on.
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Linus Pauling
Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace
Linus Pauling: When the atomic bomb was dropped at Hiroshima, and then at Nagasaki, I was immediately asked, within a month or two, by the Rotary Club perhaps in Hollywood, to give a talk, an after dinner talk about atomic bombs. My talk, as I recall, was entirely on what the atom is, what the atomic nucleus is, what nuclear fission is, how it's possible for a substance to be exploded, liberating 20 million times more energy than the same amount of dynamite or TNT liberates. A couple of days after my talk, there was a man in my office from the FBI, saying, "Who told you how much plutonium there is in an atomic bomb?" And I said, "Nobody told me, I figured it out." And he went away and that was the end of that. But, I kept giving these talks and I realized that more and more I was saying, "It seems to me that we have come to the time when war ought to be given up. It no longer makes sense to kill 20 million or 40 million people because of a dispute between two nations who are running things or decisions made by the people who really are running things. It no longer makes sense. Nobody wins. Nobody benefits from destructive war of this sort and there is all of this human suffering." And, Einstein was saying the same thing of course. So, that's when we decided -- my wife and I -- that first, I was pretty effective as a speaker. Second, I better start boning up, studying these other fields so that nobody could stand up and say, "Well, the authorities say such and such "
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Shimon Peres
President of Israel
One of the things he (Ben-Gurion) said -- and I liked very much -- he said, "All experts are for things that happened. You don't have experts for things that may happen" -- which means, as he said, "If you really want to learn something, it's not enough to be up-to-date; you have to be up-to-tomorrow." That would be my first lesson, to look for the tomorrow. And eventually, I lost partly my interest in history, and I devoted most of my intellectual energies to the future. To this very day, I believe to imagine is more important than to remember. I don't believe in memories anyway, because memories in a way is to remember what to forget. You hardly remember the things that were not easy or were not right, and yet people think it is more important to remember than to think. That was my first lesson. My second lesson is, "Your best friends are not only human beings, but books." To read books is like going to swim in a sea of wisdom, endlessly fascinating. And there are so many wise people all over the world, throughout history, and you can have it free, for nothing. And reading must become a daily habit. It's not that you can read once a week. I read day in and day out, and you make acquaintances with books. After a few pages, you know with whom you are dealing. Serious, unserious, far-sighted, repetitive. That was my second lesson. My third lesson was, "Never forget there is nothing wiser than a moral choice." And the fourth point: "Don't be afraid to be alone." Future is always in a minority. So, if you want to be popular, go and praise the past. If you want to serve the future, don't be afraid to belong to a minority.
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Shimon Peres
President of Israel
Shimon Peres: We were living under an embargo. I thought we didn't have a choice but to build our own industries. And people say a small country like Israel cannot built an aeronautic industry, cannot build an electronics industry, cannot build nuclear reactors. And again, I thought we can do it, so I was charged with doing it. In the beginning it raised a great deal of skepticism and criticism, but later on people appreciate it very much. So actually we laid, at that time, the foundation for the high-tech of Israel which exists to this very day.
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