Antonio Munoz Molina Quotes

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

'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

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 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.

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

To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.

Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.

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.

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

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.

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.

The IMPAC is a terribly important award.

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'm an idiot who won the Literature Nobel Prize.

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

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

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

It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.

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

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.