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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
I suspect at a very early age that one of the things I most disliked in the world was a dishonesty and hypocrisy. Since the United States is firmly based on both, I had a rich subject, my native land, and certain taboo subjects were obviously going to interest me. Why, of all the founding fathers, did I pick Aaron Burr to write a book about? Well, I thought it was time that his point of view was expressed, because he is very interesting about the founding of the country.
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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
I have lived in the world and taken part in many things outside myself. The problem with most American writers is they only write about themselves, and they're not very interesting. I don't care about why the marriage went wrong and why the author left his wife for the au pair girl when he did not get tenure at Ann Arbor, which really broke his heart. I mean these books should be written on Kleenex and disposed of. But everybody's been told in the United States that he is interesting. "You are a very interesting person. I can just tell!" or "My feelings are just as good as your feelings." Well, that is a fairly true statement, but what's a feeling? We all have feelings and most of them are not worth dealing with. It's what you know, it's what you think, and if you have the gift of invention, very rare may I say, it's what you make up.
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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
Gore Vidal: I like the inventions, as I call them, like Myra Breckinridge, Duluth. These are totally invented universes. Anybody can describe Abraham Lincoln's life, but not many people can invent my Duluth, which I had to move, you know, from the northern part of the country. I put it a little too close to New Orleans. I don't know what shape my Duluth is in now. It may be a bit wet, but I moved it down there. I have a group of enraged Hispanics, called the Aztec Terrorists, that were trying to take over the town, and I have got two lady writers. One of them cannot spell, and reads with great difficulty, but she is very, very famous. She has won the Wurlitzer prize. There was a rather good young novelist, or he used to be young, when I knew of him, Wurlitzer. She keeps repeating it, because it sounds like Pulitzer, which didn't come her way. It's about irreality. Everything changes. Once you think you understand what a situation is, it proves not to be the case, it's something else. There is a spaceship in it, filled with giant cockroaches, and everybody is bored by it. Nobody wants to even open the thing. They just say it is going to be boring, so the spaceship sits there through most of the book, and it plays a part at the end. Not living up to expectations is a nice thing to do in prose.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
When I was in college one of the things that one of my professors said, which only later I understood -- he was a math professor, and he was telling me that he started out in physics and he switched, and I asked him, "Why did you switch from physics? because it's a lot of fun?" And he said, "My insights into math were better." And I didn't really know what he meant because at that point I'd never had an insight into anything. But, now I know exactly what he meant. You have hunches. There's some gut feeling you have that something is right, or can be done, or is ripe for investigation.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
The best thing, clearly, is that initial hunch, is that feeling you get often, at least for me, it's early in the morning. I'm lying in bed thinking and I think of something that to me at that time, seems really neat, some connection. And, nine times out of ten, after I get up and think about it and talk about it with my colleagues or my students, it turns out that it was the stupidest idea that anyone every had. But, that few minutes when you think of it, and you think that you really have come up with something that's important, that's a great feeling. And, the fact that they almost all turn out to be nothing, doesn't really matter. It was fun for the moment.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
As you know, my home country is located between two powerful nations, between Russia and Germany, who are very sociable peoples and they enjoy visiting one another, so they need to cross Poland on the way. That's why our geographical position was always tough, and we could only survive under certain circumstances. We could only survive as a nation thanks to our deep belief in God because we lived through some absolutely hopeless situations in history and on several occasions, we were erased as a country from the map of the world. But, thanks to our religious belief, we survived and in fact, we continue persisting. That's why this belief was always really deep, and it was tangible. It was not an old-fashioned religious belief -- because we continue to be a religious people -- but this is not really an outdated, old-fashioned religion, and beyond progress. Today the Polish people, myself included, find God in the newest-generation computer, because He is there. It's a question of people being able to find him there. He's very modern. He's a very modern God, and He's really very good to live with.
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Lech Walesa
Nobel Prize for Peace
Lech Walesa: A shipyard is a kind of a window to the world. In a shipyard, people are arriving from all different places around the world. There would be sailors and there would be ship owners. So, that also incited discussions about working conditions, living conditions. So people would start comparing what money they make here and what money was made elsewhere. And, the point was that those people who were aware of other things, they would revolt more quickly than the others, by comparing the achievements of one system against the other and also the working conditions and the salaries. That's why occasionally we would protest. Sometimes there were large-scale protests and sometimes they were smaller-scale protests. And, my career is actually made by those protests. Had we had better living and working conditions, I wouldn't be here talking to you.
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