Naguib Mahfouz Quotes

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

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

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

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.

The best compliment came from Knopf's Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, 'Adam, I read 'Mr. Peanut' in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn't happen often.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

I know what the Giller nominee effect is, but we'll see what the next level is.

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.

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.

What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.

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.

You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.