Top 100 Pulitzer's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.
Joseph Pulitzer
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I am a believer that color affects people's moods.
Lilly Pulitzer
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.
Robert Scheer
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Seeing Michelle Obama's bright color choices, and how she made people smile and reinforced Obama's platforms of hope and change, was inspiring.
Lilly Pulitzer
#32. 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
#33. We believe elegance can be casual. We believe gracefulness can be compatible with fits of laughter. We believe in living a colorful life
Lilly Pulitzer
#34. I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.
Harlan Coben
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The distinctive crimes of this generation are crimes of subtlety and finesse.
- ALEXANDER S. BACON 1908
J.M. Carlisle
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. There will be a moment of silence while our prints do the talking.
Lilly Pulitzer
#41. 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
#43. I can't put into words what I think about anything.
Lilly Pulitzer
#44. You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.
John Corigliano
#45. You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.
Stephen Sondheim
#47. My especial object is to help the poor; the rich can help themselves. I believe in self-made men.
Joseph Pulitzer
#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. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Pulitzer is a word but accomplishment is an aura.
Chila Woychik
#53. 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
#54. Warming up for the Brewers is that lefthander they got from the Mets, Bill Pulitzer.
Mike Shannon
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
Joseph Pulitzer
#65. 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
#66. Style isn't just about what you wear, it's about how you live.
Lilly Pulitzer
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Not always sunny, but always in a sunny state of mind
Lilly Pulitzer
#70. I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.
Robert Scheer
#72. That's what life is all about: Let's have a party. Let's have it tonight.
Lilly Pulitzer
#73. And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.
Donald Hall
#74. I adore [my son]. I wouldn't trade him in for a Pulitzer - unless someone actually offered that as an option.
Arthur M. Jolly
#75. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.
John Sandford
#82. All that a Pulitzer really does is give the obit writers something to put between the commas after your name.
Eddie Adams
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I loved my boarding school, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't have a career.
Lilly Pulitzer
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.
Dorothy Garlock
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.
Gene Weingarten
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#95. I didn't set out to be unusual or different. I just wanted to do things my way.
Lilly Pulitzer
#96. I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize.
Dick Van Patten
#97. I designed collections around whatever struck my fancy ... fruits, vegetables, politics, or peacocks! I entered in with no business sense.
Lilly Pulitzer
#98. 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
#100. 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
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