Literary Distinction Quotes

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.

Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.

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

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.

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

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.

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

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 moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

There's a big difference between the National Book Awards and the Academy Awards. At the Academy Awards you can feel the greed and envy and ego. Whereas the National Book Awards are in New York.

I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

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

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

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.