JANE ALEXANDER

JANE ALEXANDER

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Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress · Conservationist
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

MARCELO ZARVOS

MARCELO ZARVOS

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Pianist and TV/Film Composer

I think the music, the way that it's shot, and the way that it's written, of course, all work in conjunction. There’s something about a passage of time in your mind. Then it's not about the clocks. It's more about the suspended, almost like the absence of clocks, and the idea of suspended time, which memory is more like that since in our memory all time happens at once.

FREDERIC TUTEN

FREDERIC TUTEN

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Writer · Critic · Artist
it is wonderful to have more than one culture, as you know. It's a great thing in life. It's a wonderful thing in life.

If you know other languages, it's stupendous because it gives you some access, both in reading and fluidity of places, but also to know that you can have two exciting places to be in. Two exciting languages and two exciting cultures and two exciting places to visit. That's what I love, mostly. I don't think I was born in the wrong country. I wasn't really born in America. I was born in the Bronx.

YIYUN LI 李翊雲

YIYUN LI 李翊雲

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The artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country, and here's there's new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there's always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.

AGNES MOORS

AGNES MOORS

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Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences · KU Leuven

The humanities study people, their cultures, and their arts. The disciplines provide us with frameworks of meaning to understand our place in the world and in human history. They teach us how to read literature, history, religions, music, and works of visual art among many others. All of these are important aspects of what it means to be part of the global collective of humankind.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

GEORGE SAUNDERS

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Writer

I think many of my stories work on this principle: everything is just as it is in our world (they physicality, the psychology, etc) except for one distorted thing. The effect, I hope, is to make the reader (and me) see our "real" world in a slightly new light.

NOAM CHOMSKY

NOAM CHOMSKY

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I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the Enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls.

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JUNOT DÍAZ

JUNOT DÍAZ

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Writer

I think part of what I was thinking about with this project was to build the fact that [my character] Yunior is a writer and that with Yunior being a writer we get to check in with his maturing and changing perspective. [...] Therefore built into the story there’s a perspective that might not otherwise be available if I was writing far more closely to the events he was narrating. These are the weird nerdy decisions one makes as one writes where one has to decide the events that are occurring in your text. You have to decide what’s the distance between the event and the point of telling where the narrator stands, looking upon and reflecting and retelling those events.

MICHEL FABER

MICHEL FABER

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Writer

I've written a number of short stories from a first-person POV but I guess with novels I felt that this was too restrictive. What worked for me was a third-person approach that was somewhat suffused with the personality of the character.