Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

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.

It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.

If I were a writer, the Pulitzer Prize would be important to me. This is my profession, so an Oscar is important.

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

There are writers who go their whole lives and never hit that No. 1 spot.

Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don't even want to run, but, once running, can't help but not want to lose.

The first story I ever sold was to 'Argosy' magazine, which no longer exists. That issue also contained work by several other more celebrated writers, like Ray Bradbury - so I felt I had at least one toe on the ladder.

I never set out to do this - getting to No. 1 in the 'New York Times' bestseller list wasn't even a pipedream.

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.

I think that anyone who likes writing views 'The New Yorker' as the, you know, pinnacle of the publishing world. If you get 50 words published in 'The New Yorker,' it's more important than 50 articles in other places. So, would I love to one day write for them? I guess. But that's not my sole ambition.

It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.

To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.

Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read.

The idea of being published was such an abstract thing in the beginning. It wasn't even an option in my mind.

I'm not ever getting a Pulitzer prize and my books aren't on high school reading lists, but for better or worse I'm a working writer.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.

Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

I do what I love and what I always dreamed of doing for a living. I write love stories, and I have always had a publisher willing to publish them. I have a sizable and loyal audience. I have made best-seller lists and won awards. What more could anyone ask for?

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

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.

I won the Nobel prize for literature. What was your crime?