Pulitzer Prize Winners

"We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal."

"The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!"

"You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line."

"The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld."

"The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised."

"If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been darned giddy about the Rams' recent success. So giddy that he donned a necklace made of Pez candies, a red blazer - and nothing else. A few people gaped (some actually set aside their beers), but most ignored Fleming as he strutted like a red-blazered rooster, demanding that all hail the Mighty Naked Beer King."

"Beer is amazing. Nutritional. Medicinal. A beverage, but also a meal."

"Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart."

"Mr. Sandburg possesses a powerful imagination, which plays over and about his realistic themes and constantly ennobles them. ...strikes, and factories, and slaughter-houses, and railroad trains, all take on a lyric quality under his touch. ...When Carl Sandburg left college, he was no longer an unskilled labourer, working with his hands. He was a thinking man, with a brain charged with ideas and emotions, determined to do his part in bringing about the millennium. For Carl Sandburg... is a revolutionary; he must push the world to where he is convinced it ought to be. ...again and again, he deserts the seer's mountain peak for the demagogue's soap-box. ...Mr. Sandburg is like a man striving to batter down a jail with balls of brightly coloured glass. ...Whether constant preoccupation with disease is a healthy form of literature, whether it acts as a curative, is open to question. But we can surely say that to be curative the disease must be treated unsentimentally and truly. Mr. Sandburg has aimed at doing this, has striven hard to do it. For this, one honours him above his fellows. For this, and the spirit of beauty which pervades his work."

"[the story] "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" is a tribute to Amy Lowell, I've done a lot of what you might call metaliterature; that is, literature that's saying, "Isn't Amy Lowell wonderful? This is sort of like what she did." (Q: Lowell's underrated now, isn't she?) A: She was a wonderful narrative poet, but narrative verse is totally out of fashion now. I think it was one of her reactions to being a woman and a lesbian. An outsider has to write outsider verse. She's one of those people who wrote so prolifically that a lot of it is not good, but some of it is absolutely superb. She has a collection that attracted me called Down East, which is poems in New England dialect, and she has written stories of the supernatural in verse that I absolutely love."

"To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader."

"Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance."

"Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young."

"Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either of them might run out."

"Don't waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself."

"Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with those who are reckless with yours."

"Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

"Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. ... [T]rust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine."

"Do one thing every day that scares you."

"We run a car wreck photo every week, whether we have a car wreck or not. That's our golden rule."

"Nutbeem influenced a little by the lunar cycle. Had a touch of werewolf. At full moon he burst, talked himself dry, took exercise in the form of dancing and fighting at the Starlight Lounge, then slowly fell back to contemplation."

"The ocean twitched like a vast cloth spread over snakes."

"The editorial page played streams of invective across the provincial political scene like a fire hose. Harangues, pitted with epithets. Gammy bird was a hard bite. Looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eye. A tough little paper. Gave Quoyle an uneasy feeling, the feeling of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn't know."

"Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck."

"For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle initial was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork."

"which bloody misbegotten Card takes the liberty of recasting in his own insane tongue. As the bloody bog-rat's just done."

"the old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time."

"He [Quoyle] did not want a boat, shied from the thought of water. Ashamed he could not swim, couldn't learn."

"'Dad, are we scared?' said Sunshine. 'No, honey. It's an adventure."

"And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe."

"It was not until the next evening that he discovered he had a page from Leviticus stuck to his back."

"Quoyle, you got any maritime connections?' 'My grandfather was a sealer.' 'Jesus. You always come out at me out of left field."

"Dad, there's smoke coming out of the can and coming out of your mouth, too. How do you do that, daddy?"

"Quoyle large, white, stumbling along going nowhere"

"Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life"

"That was the stuff of other lives, he was waiting for his to begin. He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, "Who knows?" He said, "Who knows?" For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen. A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction."

"All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance."

"That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it."

"The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments."

"Quoyle with regards to Petal, his wife, "There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering...In another time, in another sex, she would have been Genghis Khan."

"In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there are 256 different 'over-and-under' arrangements possible... Make only one change in this 'over and under' sequence and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result."

"“I have never fallen in love with one of my characters. The notion is repugnant. Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. The only reason one shapes a character to look as he or she does, behave and speak in a certain way, suffer particular events, is to move the story forward in a particular direction. I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and “see where they go,” and I don’t understand writers who drift downriver in company with unformed characters…”"

"In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed."

"As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped."

"“This has always bothered me, the division: as though there was something about women who write that is very different.”"

"Deiter felt himself too old, lost in the forest of his own experience."

"Why do we weep in grief,' the aunt wondered. 'Dogs, deer, birds sufferent with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique."

"“I loathe interviews and getting me to sit still for a whole day is unprecedented.”"

"“Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”"

"“The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.”"