Michener was once invited by President Eisenhower to a dinner at the White House. He wrote a letter to Eisenhower explaining why he couldn't accept.

I received your invitation three days after I had agreed to speak a few words at a dinner honoring the wonderful high school teacher who taught me how to write. I know you will not miss me at your dinner, but she might at hers. In his lifetime, a man lives under fifteen or sixteen presidents, but a really fine teacher comes into his life but rarely.

Eisenhower wrote back to say that he understood.

This story was told by composer Lalo Schifrin on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, during an interview with Liane Hansen, September 16, 2007.]

Once I had a meeting with him (Pavarotti), in New York City, in his penthouse. All of a sudden in the middle of the meeting, a young German soprano singer showed up and she was accompanied by a gentleman. Luciano said to me, "Oh, I'm sorry. I have to interrupt this meeting with you because I forgot that I promised to audition her for the Luciano Pavarotti International Competition." So he asked her, pointing to the young man: "is he your pianist?"

"No," she said. "He is my boyfriend."

"Oh, okay. Do you have any music?" asked Luciano. But she didn't have any music and she didn't have a pianist but she wanted to sing some arias. So I said, "I will accompany her."

She was terrible. She was very, very bad. She sang out of tune and she couldn't maintain the voice and so after awhile Luciano said to her, "Come over to my desk."

He had an enormous desk with a big equestrian statue on it. Pointing to the statue, he asked the young woman: "Do you see the details of the muscles of the horse? Do you see all these details?"

"Yes," she said.

"Do you think that the one who made this statue was a good sculptor?"

"Oh, absolutely," she said.

"Well, you know, he had something to start with. He had the marble. I'm sorry to tell you this but you don't have the marble."

After a dinner party Robert Frost and the other guests went out onto the veranda to watch the sunset. "Oh, Mr. Frost, isn't it a lovely sunset?" exclaimed a young woman. "I never discuss business after dinner," Frost replied

Dr. Thomas Morell (1703-1784), the librettist of many of Handel's works, was roused at five o'clock one morning by the composer, who had come in his carriage some distance from London. Handel, then engaged in composing an oratorio, asked him: "Vat de devil means de vord 'billow'?" The doctor, laughing at the trivial reason for his interrupted sleep, explained that a billow was a wave upon the sea. "Oh, de vave!" Handel exclaimed, and promptly bade his coachman return to London, without so much as another word to the doctor.

One day Moshe Dayan, who lost an eye while fighting in the British army during World War II, was stopped for speeding by a military policeman. "I have only one eye," he protested. "What do you want me to watch - the speedometer or the road!?