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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
I think I was so aware of the privilege of having this man, for some reason, having chosen me to talk to. He talked to me about his mother, his father, his dreams, his sadnesses. And I realized that it was just a pretty lucky thing in some ways that he had chosen me to be there in those last years, and use that information for that first book on Lyndon Johnson. I think from then on, it made me want to understand the private side of the public figures, because I'd had that connection with this first one I ever knew. So the kind of books that I wrote from then on were not simply the public sides of President Kennedy or President Roosevelt, but really what their lives were like in the White House at the same time.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
We, our generation, were not associated with the repression. Moreover, we ourselves were aware of the repression, and that left its mark on us, because ours was an educated generation, a generation that knew its own value, and was capable of thinking and analyzing. When we found ourselves active participants in life, in work, and in politics, then we began to see a great deal and see it clearly. Little by little there came the awareness that in this country, this society, this system, no matter how hard we tried, no matter how sincere our convictions were, very little good could be achieved. Therefore the system had to be changed.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
One can and must understand that one cannot do or know everything. Even God, who created us, doesn't lead us through life by the hand, but wishes and hopes that we will think and act in life in accordance with His commandments and expectations, and to rouse people to take the initiative, to have faith in themselves, and the desire to live as their conscience dictates. That means to awaken great feelings, which cannot help but make life into something completely different. You will say, "But that's Utopia! Could it really be that Gorbachev was filled with such Utopian ideas, when he undertook such realistic actions, the overhaul of the Soviet system?" To which I would give you a very short answer. Idealists make the world go 'round, since everything starts with ideas. Yes, ideas! Everything comes from them and everything begins there.
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Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nadine Gordimer: I think if you ask what the qualities of a writer are, you have to be born extremely observant. That is really the beginning of it. Because as Graham Greene notably said -- when people asked, "Are your characters based on people?" -- the answer is no, if you're a real writer, unless you choose a particular individual. You choose Napoleon and then you write a novel about his love life, you know, then you recreate it. But in general, what Greene said, and that I think is absolutely true and I found in my own life, he said, "You are sitting in a bus or in a queue, you are waiting to go in at the dentist and there are people there." First of all, you have to have big ears. You eavesdrop. You catch a word here and there. You see that there's a quarrel brewing perhaps, in the restaurant, and a love affair brewing somewhere else, and a case where one dominates another. You see these people and you read their body language and you create alternative lives for them.
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Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nadine Gordimer: Sometimes a story occurs to me. And a story is like an egg. It's complete. There's a shell, the white and the yolk. Well now, a short story comes to me complete, the beginning, the end, and how I'm going to get there. A novel is different. A novel I always know the beginning and I think I know the end. And then it goes in stages, it develops. I do not have it complete at the beginning. Theme I have, yes. Characters, not all of them, others may come along as I'm writing. So it's a completely different thing.
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