Stephen Dobyns Quotes

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

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

A few of the world's most famous non-American novelists have large followings in the United States, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guenter Grass, who were both popular even before winning the Nobel.

The Nobel Peace Prize is not very important, the ones that count are the scientific and literary prizes

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.

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.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.

All prizes have a role, if they are run with integrity and with a clear focus on reading and quality writing. I don't think any of them is necessary, but they all play an incredibly important role in building a body of literature, in introducing new authors to new readers, and extending reading.

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

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

Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.

In a way, my childhood was one long bunch of pages... I read and read and read.

Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.

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

I've been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school.

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.

The Nobel award occasions a unique celebration of the vision of science by the public at large. The prestige the prize confers today is largely due to the extraordinary diligence of the Nobel committees.

I read 'The Hobbit' only when I was an adult. I had a lot of friends, teenagers, who discovered reading through 'The Hobbit,' but it wasn't something that I discovered until later in life.

I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.

I'm an idiot who won the Literature Nobel Prize.

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

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.

The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain's Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn't have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers.