It was a very important finding for us because we were involved in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people interested in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people who believed that was the way to find drugs. But when we found out the structure, and we began to understand what kind of bases could be incorporated, and which ones couldn’t, and where they could be incorporated, it put a whole new dimension on it. So it had a very significant effect.

Only Mies influenced me. Le Corbusier I met. He was a nasty man, but obviously a genius. You don’t have to like the people just because they’re geniuses. Mies and I got along better and we became pretty close. I worked with him on his greatest building here, the Seagram building, which was kind of fun, but again, you can’t be a hero-worshipper and be an uncommon architect; you’ve got to be your own man. So I split with Mies and did a different kind of work.

Thrust into my profession without any training whatsoever, I had to just flounder and just find my way. It was an agonizing experience. It’s like jumping off a diving board in the Olympic contest without knowing how to swim or dive, and I just had to find my way. So one day, I said to Jimmy Cagney, “Jimmy, what is acting?” and he said, “I don’t know.” He said, “All I can tell you is whatever you say, mean it,” and I thought that marvelous counsel.

I always suspected that she was the biggest influence on me. It seems unlikely, but I always suspected that. I used to say that in interviews, and people would think I was just being smart and evasive. But I reread Jane Eyre recently, and also Villette , her other great novel. I just came across episode after episode where I thought “Oh my goodness, I just ripped that off from this book!” Perhaps you wouldn’t recognize it, but I did. Certain kinds of techniques, certain moments when you understand that the narrator is crying, not because she tells you, but because somebody watching her makes a remark. All these little things that I thought, “Oh, I used that in that book,” or “Oh, that trick.” I think Charlotte Brontë had an enormous influence on me, and I think it’s something to do with that use of first-person and the evasiveness, the indirectness, of her first-person narrative. I mean this phrase, “the unreliable narrator,” has become very popular in creative writing. So it’s not quite that, but a very subtle use of the relationship between the writer and the book and the reader — something I tuned in on, I homed in on instantly, when I started to read Charlotte Brontë. But I’ll tell you, my favorite author — novelist — is somebody who you probably wouldn’t think had any relationship to me, which is Dostoyevsky. I’ve always loved Dostoyevsky, ever since I first read him. I think he’s one of the reasons I started to read, you know, when I read Crime and Punishment when I was about 17 or 18. Dostoyevsky and Chekhov for me remain like two poles in terms of a way to approach things. I love the messiness of Dostoyevsky, the improvised — I mean a lot of it is a mess, but I like the way that strange, unexpected things have obviously come tumbling out of him that he didn’t want to necessarily have come tumbling out. On the other hand, you know, Chekhov, another great Russian writer, exemplifies the calm, controlled, very carefully structured, understated kind of work. I aspire to them both. They’re two of my great heroes.

I have generally had few setbacks and few obstacles. I have been very fortunate in that things have been handed to me rather than my going out after them. There are a few roads that I didn’t take that I maybe could have. When I was a graduate student, maybe a second-year graduate student, I worked frequently at the Illinois State Library in Springfield, and one day, the director of that library called me into his office and said, “I have some news to tell you that is still very hush-hush, but I’m resigning from this job. I’m going to the Chicago Historical Society, and I’m going to recommend that you be appointed in my place.