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Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines: I read Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and that book had a tremendous impact on me. It was about a young man who came back to the old village to visit the old people after he had graduated from his university, and he used to be a doctor, and falls in love with a beautiful woman and all that sort of thing. They lived out in the country. When I was writing my first novel, Catherine Carmier -- I started writing it in '58, I think, '58, '59 -- I knew nothing about writing a novel, and I used that Fathers and Sons as sort of my Bible, my guide. My first novel was about a young man who had been away from the old place, and then returning, and falls in love with a beautiful girl, and he loses her. I was really very much impressed by -- influenced by -- Turgenev's Fathers and Sons at that time, but then I started reading other books, of course. I was reading other books at the same time, but that was the book that had the earliest influence on my structure -- structuring a novel. It was small, and it was tightly written. It was about the country and older people and a young educated man who was a nihilist. So I thought at that time I was a nihilist, too.
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Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
Then I retitled it A Short Biography of Miss Jane Pittman, when we were talking about it, and I worked on it about a year, and my editor -- who was Bill Decker, he was at the Dial Press at the time -- Bill called me one day and he says -- because I sent him drafts of it -- he called me one day and he said, "Listen, Ernie, I think this book has to be told from the first-person point of view. She has to tell the story. These people are not telling the story right." I told him, "Well, forget it. I'm going to go and continue to do what I'm doing," and I must have done that for another month or so. And then I realized he was right. So I started in chapter one. "It was a day something like right now," she says. "Hot, hot, and dusty, dusty" were my first lines in it, and then she talks about how the Secessionist army came in, and then the Northern army behind them, chasing them and so on, and it just started there, and things began to move to move to move. I continued to read and read and read about the Civil War, and then I read about the Reconstruction period, and then I kept reading. I would write in the morning from -- oh, I'd say from about 9:00 to about 2:00, and I had to go to work. I had part-time work, and then I'd work about four hours. Then I'd come back home, and I'd read. I was always a few years ahead of the time I was writing about. If I was writing about the Civil War, I was already reading about the Reconstruction period. If I was writing about that, I was reading about some other period in time. So I'd keep reading and reading and reading. So by the time my little character would get here, I have already gotten all the information or most of it.
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John Gearhart
Stem Cell Research
It was a regimented school kind of a thing and they had control of you for 24 hours a day. So you were up at study hall at 5:30 in the morning, then you would have breakfast, then you would go to school, and the academics were very rigorous and everyone did extremely well as you can imagine. I mean, in the evening you had another long study hall so you really learned some good kinds of habits which I would say I carry toady. I get up extremely early in the morning -- at 4:00 o'clock -- and I study and I read.
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Frank Gehry
Award-Winning Architect
Frank Gehry: I try very hard to get the energy of the idea, the first idea, the drawing, and that character to the finished building. And I hate all the computer images that I've been confronted with, from the beginning until today. However, since I've gotten involved with buildings that have shape to them, that are very difficult to describe to a contractor, to a builder, I've made a relationship by some circuitous route, through IBM, to the people in France that make the Mirage airplane, Dassault. And they have a software, or a program, CATIA, for making airplanes, that allowed us to describe steel structures and curved structures in a way that demystified them for the builder, so that they weren't afraid and didn't superimpose fear costs on the project. We've been very successful in that, and I think it's turned the tide. In other words, most architects and contractors are in mortal battle from the day they start. The contractor is scared of the costs and losing money, and the architect is pushing to get his or her dream to fruition, and they're in conflict. And I found, through this funny gadget, that the architect can become the master builder, can become the leader, can direct the project, and the contractor likes it. They would rather be the child in the equation than the parent. They'd rather have the conceiver take a parental role. So it's through this technology that I've found, in the few projects now, that it's been very possible to change that relationship, in a positive way, for everybody.
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Frank Gehry
Award-Winning Architect
I used to think that the explanation robbed the essence out of the thing. It was sort of, "I didn't want to take this." There is a feeling of that in the art world or in architecture, but I discovered that the more I could explain myself, the better it was in terms of the relationship with the other people, and that even when I became very intuitive and I didn't know exactly where I was going, I could analyze it for somebody and tell them what I thought I was doing and where I thought I was doing it and how it fit into the history of my work. So I think in my case, I find the clients very important to the equation.
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