Pulitzer Quotes

#1. 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.

Jennifer Egan

#2. As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it's in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.

Regina Brett

#3. I adore [my son]. I wouldn't trade him in for a Pulitzer - unless someone actually offered that as an option.

Arthur M. Jolly

#4. And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.

Donald Hall

#5. I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

Robert Scheer

#6. Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#7. I'm fully aware that not every cartoon is Pulitzer material. That said, I'm proud of my Pulitzer portfolio, the 20 that got judged.

Steve Breen

#8. This is the funniest book I've ever held in my hands.
Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning humorist and author says about Radical Sabbatical

Dave Barry

#9. Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

Christopher Bram

#10. He was bursting with enthusiasms. He probably loved many things: the hawk in flight, the god-damned ocean, full moon, Balzac, bridges, stage plays, the Pulitzer Prize, the piano, the god-damned Bible.

Charles Bukowski

#11. I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.

Ishmael Reed

#12. I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

John Corigliano

#13. I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Zack Snyder

#14. Warming up for the Brewers is that lefthander they got from the Mets, Bill Pulitzer.

Mike Shannon

#15. I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.

Evan Hunter

#16. Pulitzer is a word but accomplishment is an aura.

Chila Woychik

#17. One could get locked in by the Pulitzer, thinking, 'This is who I am.' Doors open with it, but doors in your mind could close.

Suzan-Lori Parks

#18. I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize.

Dick Van Patten

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

#20. According to a new book coming out by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, apparently when he was in high school, President Obama smoked large amounts of marijuana. You know what that means? He could be our first green president.

Jay Leno

#21. When Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism' came out in January 2008, his employer 'National Review Online' announced that Tribune Media Services, which carries Goldberg's opinion columns, had 'nominated' Goldberg for a Pulitzer in commentary.

Bill Dedman

#22. The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

Gene Weingarten

#23. I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

Colin Callender

#24. I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

Dorothy Garlock

#25. Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.

Ian McEwan

#26. Because this story is the road to the Pulitzer, something you covet very badly. I'm willing to bet that just the idea of this story is making you harder than the blonde at the bar.

M.K. Schiller

#27. All that a Pulitzer really does is give the obit writers something to put between the commas after your name.

Eddie Adams

#28. You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

John Sandford

#29. The great 'New York Times' columnist Dave Anderson famously slept one year in a child's race-car bed. There he was, Pulitzer Prize and all, snoring as his feet dangled over the rear tires of Lightning McQueen.

Willie Geist

#30. I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

Lou Holtz

#31. It was my TBR-my TO Be Read stack. The usual subjects were there. Chick lit. Action. A Pulitzer Prize winner. A romance novel about a pirate and a damsel in a low-cut blouse (What? Even vampire enjoys a little bodice ripping now and again.)

Chloe Neill

#32. My guess is that the editor [Cincinnati Post] wanted his own Jeff MacNelly (a Pulitzer winner at 24), and I didn't live up to his expectations. My Cincinnati days were pretty Kafkaesque.

Bill Watterson

#33. To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician) ... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.

Randy Sandke

#34. The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Scheer

#35. After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as 'night, Mother.'

Marsha Norman

#36. I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I'd won the Pulitzer Prize.

Rick Atkinson

#37. I don't think that the Pulitzer should be given the way it is. I think the competition should be anonymous. I think completely different people would win it if the names were taken off because a lot of it is done on relationships and names.

John Corigliano

#38. To say the Israelis were caught off guard was like saying the Great Wall of China is long" is not just a random bad sentence, it's LaHaye and Jenkins's idea of Pulitzer-winning prose.

Daniel Radosh

#39. Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.

Richard Harris

#40. I knew from experience at the Negro Ensemble Company that it wasn't until there was a place controlled by black artists ... that Pulitzer Prize-winning work like 'Ceremonies in Dark Old Men' and 'A Soldier's Play' came to fruition.

Michael Schultz

#41. Imagine Pulitzer prizefighting.

Steven Wright

#42. My eyes widened at the ball of orange fluff squeezing out from under the counter, blinking and stretching.
I looked again, not believing.
"It's a cat," I said, winning the Pulitzer prize for incredible intellect.

Kim Harrison

#43. The Pulitzer has nothing to do with me; it's more about people's perceptions of me, whatever they may be. I'm not being humble - I honestly do not and cannot think about that. It's a lovely piece of crystal on my bookcase, but that's all it is to me.

David Lindsay-Abaire

#44. The thing is, if you make best-sellerdom your goal, you're going to be in trouble. It's a very nice thing to have happen, but if one makes that a goal like, say, a literary writer has the goal of getting the Pulitzer Prize, that's so unpredictable.

Diane Mott Davidson

#45. I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

Larry McMurtry

#46. Murder is illegal, but if you take a picture of it you may get your name in a magazine or maybe win a Pulitzer Prize. However, sex is legal, but if you take a picture of that act, you can go to jail.

Larry Flynt

#47. All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

David Baldacci

#48. I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

Rita Dove

#49. You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.

Stephen Sondheim

#50. You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

John Corigliano

#51. The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

Annie Dillard

#52. Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#53. Pulitzer was the first to cram a paper with pictures and games under shrieking headlines. He offered eight packed pages of thrilling content for only two cents.

Al Roker

#54. I did a play called 'Disgraced' in 2012 at Lincoln Center, which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. I played the lead character, a Muslim American, who had renounced Islam and became very anti-Islam.

Aasif Mandvi

#55. I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.

Harlan Coben

#56. We've been able to watch on our television screens sophisticated weaponry find a building; and we've seen dramatic reports from the front where Pulitzer Prize-to-be winning reporters stood up and declared, the United States is attacked, and all that.

George W. Bush

#57. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies and directed by Sundance nominee James Ponsoldt, 'The End of the Tour' is a terrific film, among the year's best with its two-man tarantella of wall-to-wall talk - and I watched it through my fingers as though it were Mad Max.

Steve Erickson

#58. The fact that Gene Weingarten and I and Bathroom Inventory are now part of some kind of Matrix of Poop strongly suggests that the Pulitzer is not what it once was.

Dave Barry

#59. The Velmas of the world do not intern at CNN, hope to be accepted at Columbia J-School after graduating NYU with honors, and go on to win Pulitzer Prizes by getting bogged down in relationship drama. That's a problem for the Daphnes of the world. Daphne, you bitch, you can't even drive the damn van.

Rachel Cohn

#60. Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc ... ) and their truths don't "count" as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#61. If you found yourself in a situation where you could either save a drowning man, or you could take a Pulitzer prize winning photograph of him drowning, what shutter speed and setting would you use?

Paul Harvey

#62. A Pulitzer Prize is awaiting the journalist who can find an American who dies of hunger, and probably the Nobel Prize for literature as well.

Tom Bethell

#63. I think that no matter whether you're Quentin Tarantino or any other kind of a rebel, or whatever, everyone who makes movies still wants to win an Academy Award, because it's like the Pulitzer Prize or the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Robert Osborne

#64. That's what life is all about: Let's have a party. Let's have it tonight.

Lilly Pulitzer

#65. Newspapers should have no friends.

Joseph Pulitzer

#66. Not always sunny, but always in a sunny state of mind

Lilly Pulitzer

#67. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

Kathryn Schulz

#68. Style isn't just about what you wear, it's about how you live.

Lilly Pulitzer

#69. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.

Joseph Pulitzer

#70. Money is the great power today. Men sell their souls for it. Women sell their bodies for it. Others worship it. The money power has grown so great that the issue of all issues is whether the corporation shall rule this country or the country shall again rule the corporations.

Joseph Pulitzer

#71. A newspaper that is true to its purpose concerns itself not only with the way things are
but with the way they ought to be.

Joseph Pulitzer

#72. I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people.

Joseph Pulitzer

#73. Wear pink and make the boys wink.

Lilly Pulitzer

#74. Despite the forecast, live like it's spring.

Lilly Pulitzer

#75. What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.

Joseph Pulitzer

#76. I designed collections around whatever struck my fancy ... fruits, vegetables, politics, or peacocks! I entered in with no business sense.

Lilly Pulitzer

#77. I didn't set out to be unusual or different. I just wanted to do things my way.

Lilly Pulitzer

#78. Time means nothing to me.

Lilly Pulitzer

#79. I loved my boarding school, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't have a career.

Lilly Pulitzer

#80. Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.

Joseph Pulitzer

#81. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something
(All The King's Men)

Robert Penn Warren

#82. I don't like my whole life dragged out. I don't want anyone to know about me, because I don't think I'm very interesting ... I like my work. I like what I gave. And that was it.

Lilly Pulitzer

#83. Being happy never goes out of style.

Lilly Pulitzer

#84. You see, the world is as big as an elephant or small as a grain of sand, depending on you. You can let it stomp you, gore you, swallow you up. Or you can let it slip into your shell and turn into a pearl." -- Benjamin East

Jonathan Freedman

#85. They call me the father of illustrated journalism. What folly! I never thought any such thing. I had a small newspaper, which had been dead for years, and I was trying in every way to build up its circulation. What could I use for bait? A picture, of course.

Joseph Pulitzer

#86. Life's a party, dress like it.

Lilly Pulitzer

#87. I am a believer that color affects people's moods.

Lilly Pulitzer

#88. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.

Joseph Pulitzer

#89. It's always summer somewhere.

Lilly Pulitzer

#90. Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.

Joseph Pulitzer

#91. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.

Joseph Pulitzer

#92. I want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee.

Joseph Pulitzer

#93. The Lilly girl is always full of surprises. She lives everyday like it's a celebration, never has a dull moment, and makes every hour a happy hour.

Lilly Pulitzer

#94. There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.

Joseph Pulitzer

#95. My especial object is to help the poor; the rich can help themselves. I believe in self-made men.

Joseph Pulitzer

#96. What you could be.

Anthony Doerr

#97. I can't put into words what I think about anything.

Lilly Pulitzer

#98. I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.

Joseph Pulitzer

#99. There will be a moment of silence while our prints do the talking.

Lilly Pulitzer

#100. Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

Edith Wharton