Emma Donoghue Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

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.

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

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.

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.

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.

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

Since, therefore, individuals as well as the public are so indebted to these writers for the benefits they enjoy, I think them not only entitled to the honour of palms and crowns, but even to be numbered among the gods.

In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.

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

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

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

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

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.

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.