Professor Randall was a great advisor and a great mentor. He taught me, I think, in the best possible way. He was not a brilliant lecturer. His courses were fairly pedestrian. I didn’t think his seminars were particularly interesting. But working with him on a one-to-one basis as his assistant, I think that’s the way one has to learn to be a historian. That is, he was writing, and if he needed some particular reference, I had to go find it and get it. If he was writing, he wanted everything checked meticulously over and over again. So I had to take the manuscript over to the library and check it all out. So that by working closely with him, I got to see, first of all, a lot of the library and its extensive holdings, but I got, even more important, to understand what a scholar is about. It is about care. It is about “pains-taking.” It is about judgment as well as it’s about very skillful writing. He was an excellent writer as well. So in that sense, Professor Randall and Mrs. Randall shaped my future career.

Yes, a major one, along with Sir Georg Solti. Because they’re both Hungarian, I used to call them the Hungarian mafia. He was always onto me. “Have you bring to Vera?” And then she’d say, “Georg, he won’t be liking this bit.” And between the two of them, there was this whish-whish-whish, like sword fighting, and I was being killed by the both of them. But I enjoyed every minute of it. It was good for me.

For me, since when I was a child, all writers have been collective. They are searching meanings in life. Sometimes they are lost and sometimes they are determined and all their efforts and all their strengths have been my inspiration. So it’s very difficult for me to pick some names of the inspiration. It’s very difficult for me.

We had the classics, published by Scribners, all the great stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest which were illustrated by the great N.C. Wyeth. In those days, when childhood diseases were extended, you were home with the measles or mumps or chicken pox for two or three weeks at a time, and you were supposed to stay in bed. There wasn’t any television, there wasn’t much to do, so I would stare at those paintings in those books by the hour. I didn’t read them all. I loved to just look at those pictures and study every detail. I could sit down and draw most of those pictures right now without having to refresh my memory because they were so exciting to me.