Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to judge the Man Booker if it weren't for 'Downton.'

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.

Since, therefore, individuals as well as the public are so indebted to these writers for the benefits they enjoy, I think them not only entitled to the honour of palms and crowns, but even to be numbered among the gods.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

What makes a publishing house great? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time.

I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

I think that China has many outstanding authors, and their great works should also be recognised by the world.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.