Chely Wright Quotes

Authors should be honored only for their works.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

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.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

Honestly, I never thought we'd get a nomination for a Grammy, period. To be honest, we felt that if we were ever going to get one, we thought we had 'City of Evil' and 'Nightmare' and 'Hail to the King,' and those were all big records, and they never even sniffed at us.

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

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.

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

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

I think a lot of my dreams have come true, and my next dream is to have a No. 1 selling album. A Grammy-award-winning album.

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

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.

People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

The GRAMMY was a huge deal. It's the height of any musical career.

I would love to have a song that I wrote by myself to win a 'Song of the Year' award.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

Writers are not celebrities, so you don't expect to walk down the street and hear, 'Oh my God, there's Sylvia Day.' You prefer to be anonymous.

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

When you've written 10 books and have six on the New York Times best-seller list - and four have been No. 1 - I think you have a right to be a member of Congress.