Terry Pratchett Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you're immortal.

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.

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

I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.

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.

Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read.

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.

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

There are writers who go their whole lives and never hit that No. 1 spot.

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