James B. Stewart is a lawyer, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose most recent book is Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America. Before discussing famous perjurers’ effects on the American legal system in front of a full house at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he took questions in our Green Room.
Q. What is the last thing you do before you go to sleep at night?
A. Usually read.
Q. What do you eat for breakfast?
A. I am a big believer in a hearty, as we’d say in the Midwest, cooked breakfast. So I sometimes have any kind of eggs or bagel or toast, sometimes with ham. I’ve shied away from bacon lately. Other days I’ll have fruit and cottage cheese and then a bagel, coffee. Only a good bagel, never the packaged kind from the supermarket.
Q. What is your favorite movie?
A. I remember one New Year’s Eve because of one personal crisis or another, I had nothing to do. I was lingering at the office kind of pathetically thinking of things to do. And on the way home, I passed a theater, and it was playing the Woody Allen movie Bullets Over Broadway. On impulse, all by myself I went in, I was really feeling pretty low. I came out there walking on air, it totally rejuvenated me. I ended up going out to a party later that night. It turned my whole mood around.
I don’t know I would say that’s my favorite, though; if you gave me more time I’d probably come up with five or six other possibilities.
Q. What would you eat for your last meal?
A. It’s funny you mention that, because recently I was on the Charlie Rose Show and I was on my way home and on impulse I went into this oyster bar on the corner near my apartment, and they were so good, they were so transporting, and I thought to myself, “If I was on death row, this is what I’d eat for my last meal. Really good oysters.”
Q. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. As an adolescent I was fascinated by the idea, “How would anyone know you were a genius?” You could just be a genius without knowing it. So I figured you had to try everything to see if you were a genius at it. Every conceivable activity I tried to see if I was a genius. Predictably, by the end of this survey, lightning had not struck. But I think by the end of it if you had said “you can be anything you want in the world,” I would have been a concert pianist. Although with the caveat that I wouldn’t have had to practice or anything, I just would have been a natural genius and I would be parading out in front of big orchestras effortlessly and reeling off major concertos.
Q. What is your favorite animal?
A. I am the proud master, if that’s the appropriate word, of two cats, and I dearly love them. So at the moment, that’s what I love the most.
Q. What’s your favorite way to spend a Saturday afternoon?
A. Puttering around the garden. I have a house in upstate New York, and I really like getting outside and digging. Especially in the spring, for the first time there’s the wonderful loamy smell of fresh earth and putting your hands down into it is a very satisfying way to spend an afternoon. Although I did that recently and got poison ivy, so there are risks.
Q. What was the best advice you ever received?
A. If you’re writing a book, which is something I’ve done now many times, all that matters is that you are proud of it. Never write a book because someone else tells you it’s a great idea, or, god forbid, because they think it’s going to be a bestseller, but because it’s something you care passionately about. If nothing else, if you write a book you’re proud of, it’s there on your shelf for the rest of your life and you’re going to feel really good about it.
Q. What country would you most like to visit?
A. Because of my work, largely, I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve been almost everywhere. The one place I haven’t been that I definitely want to before I die is Egypt. That was on my mind with the recent upheavals because I thought “Oh my god, I’ve never been there. What if something happens and it gets closed off to travel and I would never see the treasures of the Nile.”
Q. What is your beverage of choice?
A. I think a good red Bordeaux.
To read more about Stewart’s conversation, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.