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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Robert Strauss: My mother was the major inspiration in my life, not my father. I got along with him well, but he was not very strong. My mother was strong and kind, and I guess we never had a cross word. She used to worry that I was studying too much, and my father used to say, "Good God Almighty! How can you say he's studying too much? He never does anything but run around, and he makes terrible grades, and you tell him not to study so much." And her answer would be, "Well, you know, if he starts worrying about his grades, he'll get an ulcer, and I don't want him to lose his health. He's got such a long life ahead of him, and he's going into politics and diplomacy." So she had already begun to carve out -- that's the inspiration I had. Instead of a teacher, it was my mother.
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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I came from a Jewish family, and my parents lived, as I said, in West Texas, and I had a grandmother who lived in Forth Worth, and on one of the high holidays in the fall, the family would all come to Fort Worth, and we would spend a day or so with my grandmother, who came from Germany and who was very German -- in fact, we called her grossmama not "grandmother." But when they would gather around there, my mother would always say, "My son Bobby is going to be a diplomat, and he's going into politics, and he'll be the first Jewish Governor of the State of Texas." I can remember being 14 years old, 12, 13 years old maybe, in that age, and walking into the room, and one of my uncles would say, "Well, here comes the Governor," and they would all laugh, and I could have killed the sonofabitches. But my mother ignored them totally. She would just smile. And she wasn't far wrong; I had a successful political career.
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Hilary Swank
Two Oscars for Best Actress
As a child, I felt like an outsider, and that's not just specific to me. I think everyone has felt like that at one point or another in their life, but for me, I would read books and watch movies, and in that way, I would feel understood. I felt like characters were going through something I was going through, or that would make me feel, "Oh, there's someone in the world that is understanding," and they almost became like they were my friends. And when I realized that it was something I could do with my life -- that I could become an actor and tell these stories, that I could continue to learn about myself in a deeper way, that I could entertain at the same time, and hopefully give that to another child or person and just continue to learn about the human experience -- it was really my draw to become an actor and how I describe what movies are.
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
Amy Tan: Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books.
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
One day, after being told one of these stories didn't work, I thought, "I'm just going to stop showing my work to people, and I'm just going to write a story. Make it fictional, but they'll be Chinese-American." What amazed me was: I wrote about a girl who plays chess and her mother is both her worst adversary and her best ally. I didn't play chess, so I figured that counted for fiction, but I made her Chinese-American, which made me a little uncomfortable. By the end of this story I was practically crying. Because I realized that -- although it was fiction and none of that had ever happened to me in that story -- it was the closest thing of describing my life. Of the feelings that I had, of these things that my mother had taught me that were inexplicable or had no name. This invisible force that she taught me, this rebellion that I had. And then feeling that I had lost some power, lost her approval and then lost what had made me special. It was a magic turning point for me. I realized that was the reason for writing fiction. Through that, this subversion of myself, of creating something that never happened, I came closer to the truth. So, to me, fiction became a process of discovering what was true, for me. Only for me.
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