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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
Stuttering is kind of -- I suppose it shows basic fright. Like in the comic strips, when people begin to stutter it's because they're afraid. And also, a feeling that -- my father thought that I had too many words to get out all at once. So, I didn't speak very pleasingly, but I never stopped speaking or trying to communicate this way, and I think the stuttering has gotten better over the years. I have found having a microphone is a great help, because you don't have to force your voice out of your throat, just a little noise will work. But, it was real enough, and one of the things -- you know, you write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: Since I've gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So, I work three or four hours in the morning, and it's not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There's a lot of junk in your life as a writer and most people have junk in their lives. But, I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There's a danger if you don't move it along steadily that you're going to forget what it's about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I've been maintaining this schedule off and on -- well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in '57. It's a long time to be doing one thing. I don't know how to retire. I don't know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It's still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe abandon the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I've operated.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
This present novel that will be out -- Villages -- I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit -- the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I'm married to here, and I'm going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it's good to have a certain doggedness to your technique. In college I was struck by the fact that Bernard Shaw, who became a playwright only after writing five novels, would sit in the British Museum, the reading room, and his quota was something like maybe five pages a day, but when he got to the last word on the last page, -- whether it was the middle of a sentence -- he would stop. So this notion that when you have a quota, whether it's two pages or -- three is how I think of it, three pages -- that it's a fairly modest quota, but nevertheless if you do it, really do it, the stuff will accumulate.
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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
Gore Vidal: My father was a great influence. He was a real jock. He was an all-American football player, a quarterback at West Point, part of the great winning team of 1917. He was captain of the team. I was the mascot. They lost the game to Navy. Nobody's perfect. But his character was a great stimulus to me. Athletes who do everything easily -- and he got a silver medal for the decathlon at the Olympic games in Antwerp in 1924 -- great athletes are very serene. They have to be. I remember he said -- he wasn't talking to me because I was not interested in athletics -- but he was talking to somebody, and he said, "Well, never look back." In other words, if you've missed a shot at tennis, never think about it again, go right on to the next one. And this was terribly good advice about life's hazardous ways, so I took that seriously.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
Most things don't work, either because the idea was wrong -- the connection was wrong -- or because of execution. Trying to prove that the idea was right is very difficult. And the combination of those two things almost guarantees that somewhere between 90 and 99 percent of experiments will fail. And in order to cope with that, you need a sense of humor. You need to understand that, yeah, it didn't work, but there's got to be something good that came out of it. You must have learned something, or there's got to be something funny about how it didn't work, or something that we can be happy about that will stimulate us to try it again the next day.
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