When Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930, he began to receive fan mail. One young woman proposed becoming his secretary. “I’ll do everything for you,” she wrote. “And when I say everything, I mean everything.”
Lewis’ wife, Dorothy, saw the letter and responded. “My dear Miss,” she wrote. “My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for ‘everything,’ I take care of that myself — and when I say everything, I mean everything.”
George Bernard Shaw is the only person who has won both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award.
He won the Nobel in 1925 and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1938 (for Pygmalion).
“I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite,” he once said, “but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
As the story goes….
Physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee used to discuss their work over lunch at a Chinese restaurant on 125th Street in Manhattan. One day they made an important insight into parity violation, and the two received the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics.
After the award was announced, one of them noticed a sign in the restaurant window: “Eat here, get Nobel Prize.”
(Thanks, as usual, to the wonderful Futility Closet)
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