Alexi Zentner Quotes

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.

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.

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

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.

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

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.

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

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

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

If you're not going to wear a tiara when you win a Newbery Award, when are you going to wear one?

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

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

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

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.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

Making the best-seller list is a big deal; it's like being nominated for an Oscar. Hitting No. 1 is like actually winning the award. It's very gratifying.

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.

The IMPAC is a terribly important award.

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

I'm not going to pretend that I never fantasized about winning the Hugo. Or the Nebula, for that matter. I just never thought it was an actual real possibility.

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.

Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.

Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.