Literary Validation Quotes

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.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

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.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

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.

If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other respectable literary venue. And that's okay. I can live with that.

Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.

I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I've written.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right.

I didn't know I was really a writer until I read it in the New York Times. And then I thought, "Oh my god, maybe I can really do this". That was a review of "Margaret."