Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.