Pulitzer Prize Winners

"I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'"

"I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head."

"I like the lemon meringue pie but I don't like the way Americans leave out the 'r' at the end of a word."

"And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before."

"I don't see at all why good fiction has to be global fiction. It's the lot of some writers, who are-because of the accidents of history-forced to be on the move. Then there are the Richard Fords and the Russell Banks who may be writing of small town America, but with great gifts, and great compassion. It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having to have a prescription for the global ills which afflict us."

"You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better."

""I'm not worried," I said. And I wasn't, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it."

"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again - which is a loss. But to shield yourself - as I didn't do - seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."

"I’ve loved all his books, from the characters to the parenthetical sentences. His voice always sounds so casual, as if the narrator is working it out in his head for the first time. There’s quiet intensity, an easy familiarity with the character. You know the habits in how the character thinks, what he might take into account. The narrator is more observational than judgmental, and forgiving in that way. It has much to do with a need to be rewarded for doing more, or compensated for following the rules or recognized as better for working harder. It’s not simple greed. It’s about a sense of self before and after you’ve taken the wrong road to a land of diminishing opportunity."

"It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents."

"Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes."

"I may be too cynical," Catherine says."

"One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure you're still able. And once that's over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying."

"People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it."

"Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world."

"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him."

"The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam."

"The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character."

"When I heard the news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, I had a lot of questions. And one of the people I wanted to talk to was Lawrence Wright. He's joined us several times on the show. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11, which is based in part on more than 500 interviews, including interviews with friends and relatives of bin Laden."

"I’ve studied Jonestown, radical Islam. They’re oftentimes good-hearted people, idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt."

"Listen, bin Laden is - you know, he's not irrelevant. He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade, actually more than a decade if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him. He's been a symbol of resistance and also of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important."

"Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida eventually will die. But the model that al-Qaida has created of an asymmetric terror group that has enormous consequences in the world well beyond the size of the group, that's going to endure. Other groups are going to try to follow that model."

"In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet."

"People are always asking me if I'm frightened, hanging out with al Qaeda, but usually those encounters are one-on-one interviews. I'm talking to people whose views I don't agree with, but that happens all the time."

"The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations."

"Karl Shapiro's poems are fresh and young and rash and live; their hard clear outlines, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere, of aerial perspective, but with notable visual and satiric force. The poet early perfected a style, derived from Auden but decidedly individual, which he has not developed in later life but has temporarily replaced with the clear Rilke-like rhetoric of his Adam and Eve poems, the frankly Whitmanesque convolutions of his latest work. His best poem — poems like "The Leg," "Waitress," "Scyros," "Going to School," "Cadillac" — have a real precision, a memorable exactness of realization, yet they plainly come out of life's raw hubbub, out of the disgraceful foundations, the exciting and disgraceful surfaces of existence."

"You've always been my favorite editor because you're not like an editor at all."

"I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro-a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. It was, "Poetry doesn't make Cadillacs.""

"Like Jarell, Shapiro was a poet who felt like "stating his opinion or expressing his pleasure or disdain for something that had occurred [or] which should not have occurred" … As editor of Poetry Shapiro was faithful to this approach. Instead of asking professional critics to review or write articles for Poetry, he mainly evaluate their peers. … On several occasions Shapiro had made it seem as if these literary rows just befell him, as if he were accidentally stuck in the middle of two opposing camps that each had an ax to grind. However, he was not quite that innocent."

"It was only in college, when I read a poem by Karl Shapiro beginning "To hate the Negro and avoid the Jew/ is the curriculum," that it flashed on me that there was an untold side to my father's story of his student years."

"Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone’s life. … When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn’t believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn’t have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along."

"Influence is strange. Because one can be influenced powerfully in every way but technique. For instance, I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner."

"I was at Notre Dame just a few years ago, and one of the professors there said to me, “You don’t know what effect In Defense of Ignorance had. It ripped the whole academic community in half!” I’m glad I wrote the book. I like it, and I still stand by my observations, although I wouldn’t write it so violently now. I guess I really am in the Whitman tradition."

"I always had this feeling — I’ve heard other Jews say — that when you can’t find any other explanation for Jews, you say, “Well, they are poets.” There are a great many similarities. This is a theme running all through my stuff from the very beginning. The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or troublemaker. Well, the Jews began their career of troublemaking by inventing the God whom Wallace Stevens considers the ultimate poetic idea. And so I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive — you have to at least pretend that you are “seriously” in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all. You are outside observing it."

"The public has an unusual relationship to the poet: It doesn't even know that he is there."

"Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise. For very real reasons. Not only had I been out of the country when my first two books were published, but I have always been “out of the country” in the sense that I never had what ordinarily is thought of as a literary life, or been part of a literary group. What psychiatrists nowadays call a support system. I never had any of that and still don’t."

"I had never met a poet in my life before winning the Pulitzer in 1945. Well, that’s not strictly true; when I went to Johns Hopkins in 1939, W. H. Auden gave a private reading to a group of special literature students, and I was one. I shook hands with him. As it happened, at that time he was my idol, above all others as a modern poet, and that experience was a very sustaining one. But I could hardly say I “knew” him."

"I feel that after working a long time, I’ve really learned how to do what I do. I enjoy it. I don’t think there’s anything more satisfying than turning out a good stanza or a good piece of prose. And when you’re satisfied enough, you want to show it to other people. That’s called publication."

"Then in my heart a fear Cried out, "A life — why, beautiful, why dead!" It was a mite that held itself most dear, So small I could have drowned it with a tear."

"A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote, "And on this frail eyelash he walked," I said, "And climbed and walked like any mountain-goat.""

"Shapiro is back where he started half a century ago: on the outside, looking in. If the canon has changed drastically, Shapiro has not. At almost age eighty, he still heroically, if sometimes quixotically, wields his verbal weapons against real and imagined enemies, still using for his motto Thoreau's "If I have anything to regret, it is my good behavior.""

"As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families."

"Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail And exquisite, I saw in it a thing That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote. It hung upon my finger like a sting."

"Work is the antonym of free time. But not of leisure. Leisure and free time live in two different worlds. We have got into the habit of thinking them the same. Anybody can have free time. Free time is a realizable idea of democracy. Leisure is not fully realizable, and hence an ideal not alone an idea. Free time refers to a special way of calculating a special kind of time. Leisure refers to a state of being, a condition of man, which few desire and fewer achieve."

"Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation."

"Fiction is, the art of making up something. That's what it's all about, folks. Making stacks of money."

"Off and on during my life, I have passed sleepless nights in making up lists of the dozen or so books a person might choose to take along if suddenly marooned on a desert island. This is a relatively easy game for serious readers: At least half the titles would be recognized classics — the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, a good dictionary, that sort of thing. But occasionally I have made the challenge a little more difficult: "What if you could take just one book?""

"This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will."

"You neither can nor should understand what it means. Listen, it comes without guitar, Neither in rags nor in any purple fashion. And there is nothing in it to comfort you."

"Between the lines it must have hurt To see the neighborhood go down, Your neighbor in his undershirt At dusk come out to mow his lawn."