 Our first recipient's name is synonymous with the gravitas. Toni Morrison's words and characters have enriched the annals of American literature and the lives of millions of readers for more than 40 years. Her characters, in particular, the female ones, are pitch perfect and utterly transformed. Her expansive stories shine a brilliant light on being black in America, and she has an unflinching eye for intimate detail that her works are both something to behold in awe and something to identify with and own. She is our very own beloved Toni Morrison. Please join me in welcoming the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Ms. Toni Morrison. Really pleased to receive this recognition from the Sackler Center, and I am doubly delighted to be among this group of firsts. We will now be known forever as the firsties, knowing perfectly well that there will always, never, ever be something of us, of our group who is last. But I'm here because I am an artist, and it's wonderful to be in this extraordinarily beautiful museum. I was here once back in the Dark Ages. It was nothing like this, and it's beautiful. And I have to say that any organization, institution, group that does not regard artwork as finger painting and a children's recess, or think of the work that artists do as filling in time for people who are deeply disturbed, or lonely, or just unemployed. That organization is superior and rare. If you read the biographies of some of the best artists in the world, you might burst into tears because we have learned or been taught to value the pain, the misery, the poverty, the lunacy that may surround the art, but does not really inform it. And the fact is that human life has never been without artwork, whether it's body painting, or whether it's Guernica, whether it's dance in tribes, or ballet, from shot to Mozart's operas, there are cave paintings, aborigines, sand paintings, cathedrals, folktales, Tolstoy. The range covers the beginning of sensible life of the human race and continues, and we have never been without it. And we still hunger for ways to show who we are and to say what we mean. I remember being very deeply saddened a while back by some political outrage, an event leading to a consequence that was not so anger making as soiling. It seemed confirmation that this country had given up on itself and was content to let the patients run the asylum. Well, maybe that was not a bad idea since perhaps the patients know the ins and outs of the asylum better than the doctors do. Any case, for some reason that I still can't explain, this particular calamity hurt me where I had never been wounded before in my imagination. And I found myself unable to write. A friend called me during that time, and I mentioned to him the impasse that I was facing, and he shouted on the phone, no, no, no, no. You must not be stopped because this is precisely the time when artists go to work. He reminded me that the good times, the sweet times, were not only not essential for art, they might be inimical. Artists composed, wrote, painted in jails, in camps, underground when their nations were occupied by the enemy. They worked. So rather beautifully chastened, I thanked him profusely. And I have to say I have never had a problem creating sense. I salute and congratulate all of you here tonight, and especially my group and my colleagues of first years. Your commitment, and your passion, and your willingness to let nothing dissuade you, and your willingness to take control of the asylum. Thank you.