Dean Bakopoulos Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

This funding from the National Endowment for the Arts has been like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

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

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.

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.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

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.

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 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 completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.

The O. Henry has become lingua franca among writers for saying, 'That guy can write a story.' It's prestigious, respected, coveted, dreamed about. It's very satisfying to be included in this group of writers. Here's a koan: Could O. Henry win an O. Henry?

My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don't forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize.

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.

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

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.

I don't think I'm any competition to the already-existing canon of writers in Kannada. How can I ever even think of comparing myself?

I am honored to have had two Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions made from my novels - 'Silver Bells' and 'Follow the Stars Home.'