Richard Flanagan Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

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

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 I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.