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Sally Field
Two Oscars for Best Actress
When you learn to do it, if you study and you have a lot of techniques, you learn to step in someone else's shoes. Part of those shoes are created by history. You do research on who this person, if they existed or not, might have been. You use the text of the writer who has written it. You use the text itself, and all of the information that the writer has given you. But you really instill it with your own life. You find parts of yourself that actually link with that human being, even though there may be so on the page you could... I mean, how am I going to do this? There's no way I can relate to this person. And it transforms you as a person to stand in those shoes, because you realize how you are linked to everyone, profoundly, deeply, emotionally linked. And I have been changed by the strong roles I've gotten to play, of Norma Rae or Sybil and others, and I go away not the same. And it has made me wonder, "Was John Wayne John Wayne before he played those roles?" Or did Red River change John Wayne and help him to develop to be the person that he became as a human being? I think it has to go hand-in-hand.
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Sally Field
Two Oscars for Best Actress
Sally Field: Sybil had something that was a personality disorder. At that time it was called "multiple personality" and now it's called something else, which is a very real thing but not called multiple personality. I wish I could remember exactly what it's called, and it's not schizophrenia. But Sybil -- I think if you work in the arts, especially if you're in the performing arts, especially if you're an actor -- I understood the illness so much, because I have those voices in those parts of myself that contain certain colors. There's certain characters I've even given names as a child, that could be the strong one, or could be the sexy one or could be the shy one. And we, as human beings, accept that. I mean we don't name them, and we don't tell anyone that we feel that when we deal with our teachers we deal with somebody, and when we deal with our friends we deal with somebody. But I felt it very distinctly. So I really understood that particular mental illness, and subsequently have played other people with mental illness, and have felt very connected to it. I mean, thank God I can get out of it and go home, to an extent, but understand that there is this link between creativity and madness, and I have walked on that delicate line. I really understand that in the brain there is a place that, that madness and creativity sort of go like this with each other and have read about it. Later on, when I played someone who had bipolarism, I have great regard for people with mental illness and dealing with it. I am so lucky that I can flirt with it and come home.
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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
When you operate on cancer, it was different than any other thing. It never stopped bleeding. You could operate on a kidney, a liver, or do any other surgery, and if you lost blood, the organ would stop bleeding. It would turn white. All of the vessels would clamp down and the anesthetist would say, "Stop, we've got to give a transfusion." But in a tumor it would never bleed, and if they could just keep bleeding and bleeding, and there was massive bleeding, and you would use up pints of blood, and all surgeons know that. I knew there was something different about these blood vessels. And the pathologists who were criticizing for example, had never seen the blood, because once we hand them the tumor, it's white, and so to them it's bloodless. And the oncologists, a further step away, had never come to the operating room, so they were looking at x-rays. And the basic scientist has only seen cancer in a dish. And it began to dawn on me that they were missing something, and I said, "These people are wrong."
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
Carlos Fuentes: I had two grandmothers, and both were storytellers. One was from Vera Cruz, on the gulf coast; the other one was from Mazatlan in Sinaloa on the Pacific Coast. So I had two oceans at my disposal. I spent my summers with my grannies in Mexico. My father was counselor of the Mexican Embassy in Washington at the time. I think that I became a writer because I heard those stories -- all the stories that I didn't know about Mexico, about my own land. They were the storehouse of these great tales of migrants, revolution, highway robberies, bandits, love affairs, ways of dressing, eating -- they had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and their hearts. So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies -- the two authors of my books really.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
I say, "I'm going to write this book," and now I sit down and I start sorting out chapters and imagining the book and saying, "Tonight, I think that tomorrow I will write such and such." I go to sleep. I wake up in the morning. I go to my table. I take the pen and something totally different comes out, which means that perhaps dreams are dictating part of your writing life in a very mysterious way. You have silly dreams. We all have silly dreams. We are naked on the street. How terrible! We fall off a roof. We're drowning in the sea. Those are the dreams you remember. But what about the dreams you don't remember? I think these are the really important dreams in your life, the underground dreams, the subterranean dreams that come out somehow in your life, and in my case, through literature. Because I can't explain otherwise why I write certain things I have never thought about before. And always on the day after a dreaming night. It's very magical.
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