Pulitzer Prize Winners

"In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: "The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering." One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco's Chinatown. (p 196)"

"As writers, of course we’re interested in human beings, human stories, human trauma, and all that is very compelling for readers. But when we write these powerful stories about individual people, we have the illusion that we’ve made a difference. And of course we have—people read the books, they’re touched emotionally by these kinds of stories, and that’s great. But to the extent that the stories that we’re telling are about people who are weaker, in some way—they come from a small country, or a forcibly removed population, they’re underrepresented collectively—individual stories don’t change the conditions that produce those refugees in the first place…"

"It's taken me a long time to understand how deeply traumatic that was, that that experience remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades. And in many ways, I've been - I spent a lifetime trying to make sense of what that trauma has meant to me."

"Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn’t say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist."

"Implicitly, the novel insists that a true war story has to take into account not just combat and soldiers, but civilians, the home front, and the military-industrial complex. For me, war is more than guns and shooting. That’s the spectacle that distracts us from how pervasive war is throughout a society and how it makes all of us complicit through things like paying taxes and watching horrifying images on TV without doing anything to stop them from happening…"

"I follow in this tradition because I believe literature matters, and in this book I insist that Asian American literature literally embodies the contradictions, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture"

"I am interested in beauty. I think with beauty comes poetry, comes the lyrical. I think beauty is concerned with justice…"

"I think that's beautiful when you also find contradictions, or you find ambiguity with your character. Ambiguity is a good word in the world of art."

"I can only respond as an artist, because that’s what I am. I’m not going to become a politician all of a sudden. I am a politician in terms of the plays that I write, the way I embrace culture, the way I embrace characters that, in my particular case, have to do with the Latino world. And I embrace the Latino experience…"

"I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader…"

"It’s much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you’re representing people in a truthful way. These characters are purely fiction—they’re inspired by people I met—which I think gave me a certain amount of leeway that I wouldn’t have had otherwise were it a verbatim piece."

"The real struggle has been since Africans first set foot on the continent, an affirmation of the value of one’s self. And I think if, in order to participate in American society, in order to accomplish some of the things which the black middle class has accomplished, if you have had to give up that self in order to accomplish that, then you are not making an affirmation of the value of the African being. You are saying that in order to do that I must become someone else, I must become like someone else…"

"You gotta write women like… they can’t express ideas and attitudes that women of the feminist movement in the sixties made. Even though I’m aware of all that, you gotta be very careful if you’re trying to create a character like that, that they don’t come up with any greater understanding of themselves and their relationship to the world than women had at that time. As a matter of fact, all my characters are at the edge of that, they pushing them boundaries, they have more understanding. I had to cut back and say, “These are feminist ideas.” My mother was a feminist, though she wouldn’t express it that way. She don’t know nothing about no feminist woman and whatnot but she didn’t accept her place. She raised three daughters, and my sisters are the same way. So that’s where I get my women from. I grew up in a household with four women…"

"We speak [in traditional portrayal] one abominable language—hip; we have one interest—women. Our lives have no beginning, no ending. We’re highly emotional in terms of reactive violence, and we do not use our minds in any way."

"We go in and try to be completely transparent with them: I am not a journalist, I’m a playwright, and I’m developing a piece that is creative and not going to be solely based on their lives but inspired by conversations that we have."

"I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying."

"What happens is this: when we come to believe that the only way to make change is to murder one another, the idea of “the other” makes less valuable the human life it possesses. As a consequence, we can kill the “other” and not feel guilty. Unfortunately, human beings spend too much time rationalizing that war is right under certain circumstances; that it’s okay to threaten and kill other human beings."

"The thing is, I can’t control that built-in bias because it’s going to exist. What I can do is reflect the world through my very unique prism and perhaps people will be able to relate. I can’t control how it’s received, nor do I want to control how it’s perceived. What I want is for people to go into the theatre and in some way their perception is shifted, so that if they do enter with their biases, perhaps they won’t leave with them."

"My motto when I was writing this was ‘replace judgment with curiosity’."

"We’re just getting out of domestic situation plays in which we were examining our lifestyle. We’ve been portrayed as a unique, complex kind of people…and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public. The truth is we do everything."

"I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling."

"Jazz in itself is not struggling…That is, the music itself is not struggling. It and the baseball history you talk about are two anchors of the African American cultural community. It’s the attitude that’s in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."

"On the one hand, Wilkerson is very concerned about dehumanizing any group because it is then easy to harm individuals within that group solely because of them belonging to it. But she needs to know that her work plays into the hands of those very forces that are dehumanizing Hindus. This is happening rapidly and turning Hindus into a defenseless people that do not deserve to be treated fairly because of allegations that they are predators and oppressors. She disapproves of people becoming slaves to group think and yet, group thinking against Hinduism is precisely what her work is causing. She is also against the use of oppression to assert control but does not address that the academic harassment of Hindus on campuses is actually a form of that very oppression."

"My parents absolutely did not think of themselves as part of the Great Migration. They knew they were part of a great wave. No one really talked about it in those terms or gave it a name. I grew up surrounded by people who were from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia -- all around me. My parents' friends were all from there. They socialized with people from there. They were quite ambitious and competitive among themselves, bragging about that they were going to put their child through Catholic school because that was going to give them a better chance at succeeding…"

"Some of these things seem as if it’s a lot of hard work, and it is. But it’s to an end—toward a richer, deeper understanding of a phenomenon that I was seeking to bring to life…The term narrative comes from Greek for the word knowing. And I think that that’s a powerful message because it means you cannot tell a story until you know the story."

"(I recommend over and over again:) The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. I am far from the first to recommend this book but that is because it’s so extraordinary. A pure masterclass of narrative nonfiction that exists at the pinnacle of the genre. It is the book that a historical phenomenon as important as The Great Migration deserves."

"My mission is about reminding us of how much we all have in common and that the experiences and history of people of african descent in this country is not ‘African American History,’ it’s American History. The experiences African Americans have had, for example in the Great Migration is similar to those that other people have had. It’s a way to bridge the gulf in how people see themselves compared to others – which is the source of all divisions – you don’t see yourself in someone else, you have no empathy for someone else whose experience is different from yours…"

"After a mass extinction, it has generally tended to take many millions of years for life to recover. It's not something that you bounce back from, from one day to the next."

"The definition, I suppose, would be many, many organisms across many, many different groups. And that is, really, what we are seeing and that is what makes scientists fear ... that we're in a mass extinction. ... About a quarter of all mammals are considered endangered. ... About 40 percent of all amphibians are considered endangered. But we're also seeing organisms, invertebrates, for example, are endangered ... many species of reef-building corals are now considered very, very endangered. So you're seeing extinctions across a wide variety of groups, and that, I think, would have to be one of the defining characteristics of a mass extinction."

"one of the country’s leading science journalists."

"we’ve already set so many changes in motion, right? I mean, climate change is occurring; whatever anyone in Congress says, it’s occurring right now. You can watch, and scientists are watching, tracking species on the move all over the planet, trying to track the climate as it changes, so either moving upslope or moving toward the poles. And to the extent that we can preserve any parts of the planet that are not being chopped up or chopped down, so that we can allow species to move where they need to go, to track climate change, that is one thing that we can do, even as climate change unfolds. And unfortunately, climate change has been set in motion so that, really, though we desperately need to reduce our carbon emissions, we’re not stopping that process anytime in the near future, so that we need to start thinking about, you know, a world in which everything is on the move and preserving corridors that things can migrate through."

"We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach... We're sort of unraveling that. ... We're doing, it's often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don't know what the end point is going to be."

"I think that people are aware of the potential impacts of climate change on Arctic species. You know, everyone has seen the pictures of the poor polar bears, you know, as the sea ice shrinks. But really, where climate change could have an even more devastating impact is in the tropics, both because most species live in the tropics—that’s just where the abundance of life is—and also because these species tend to have a very, very narrow tolerance for climatic change. They’re used to a lot of climatic stability."

"now the sort of general theory is, you know, yes, the Earth changes very slowly, except for these extraordinary moments. And I’d say the whole point of writing the book is that we are in one of those moments right now."

"you have a situation where we really need to be taking serious action on climate change, and we’re still having this surreal—I guess I would use the word—debate over whether it’s happening or not. And I think a clip like that shows that, you know, people are really speaking entirely different languages. We’re just not even speaking to each other using—you know, we’re using English, but we’re not really speaking the same language. We’re not looking at the same—well, some people are looking at scientific data, and some people are not, let me just put it that way. And it’s very, very hard to carry on, you know, a reasonable and sort of post-Enlightenment conversation."

"massive things need to be done. Obviously we need to start transitioning our whole economy off of fossil fuels. That’s not—that’s not a small thing. That’s a big thing. And if you were going to ask, you know, policy experts what we should do, they would say, “Well, we need some kind of price on carbon.” Now, that is—that requires legislative action. In the absence of that, in the absence of putting a price on putting CO2 into the atmosphere, there are things the administration can do and that they are supposedly working on—you know, power plant regulations that would reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s very difficult to get the kind of action that we need without any hope of getting anything through Congress."

"Looking out your window today, the weather you see doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. The earth is big and complicated — and there’s a big time lag in the system. People need to understand that. You know, many people, many scientists, many journalists keep trying to impress that upon the public. It obviously isn’t working very well, but we keep trying."

"I think what all nonfiction writers are aiming for is to make people think about things differently — to tell you a story from somewhere that, if you’re vaguely familiar with it, challenges what you think you know about it, or, if it’s a story you’ve never heard before, introduces you to a whole new place or a whole new idea. I’m basically trying to tilt your worldview a little bit."

"So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can’t. We are captives of The Gun. The Gun is patriotic. The Gun is America. The Gun is God."

"The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it? Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.""

"The recent effort to find a new meaning for the Second Amendment comes from the failure of appeals to other sources as a warrant for the omnipresence of guns of all types in private hands. Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, as a matter of social policy. Mere common law or statute may yield to common sense and specific cultural needs. That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere. Those advocates love to quote Sanford Levinson, who compares the admitted “social costs” of adhering to gun rights with the social costs of observing the First Amendment. We have to put up with all kinds of bad talk in the name of free talk. So we must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to. Well, it doesn’t."

"For now, Kauzlarich though that giving soccer balls to Iraqi children who would run up to his Humvee screaming, "Mister, mister," was having a positive effect. A child would take home a soccer ball; his parents would ask where it came from; he would say, "The Americans"; the parents would be delighted; their confidence would increase; they would be more willing to make the difficult decisions of reconciliation; Baghdad would become secure; democracy in Iraq would thrive; the war would be won. Eventually, Kauzlarich would give up on soccer balls."

"Four of the Soldiers scrambled out a door and got out of the trench relatively dry, but the gunner was trapped inside. "He was yelling," Staff Sergeant Arthur Enriquez would remember afterward, and if there was any hesitation about what to do next, it was only because, "I didn't want to jump in the poo water." And then? "I jumped into the damn poo water""

"The resulting explosion sent several large steel disks toward the Humvee at such high velocity that by the time they reached Cajimat's door, they had been reshaped into unstoppable, semi-molten slugs. At most, the IED cost $100 to make, and against it the $150,000 Humvee might as well have been constructed of lace."

"It sounds weird, and I don't like telling people this, but the reason I joined the army is because I've always looked up to Soldiers."

"Most of the Soldiers he got weren't that way. A lot of them were great, some were brilliant, and almost all were unquestionably courageous: Sergeant Gietz, who was being nominated for a bronze star medal with Valor for what he had done in June. Adam Schumann, who had carried Sergeant Emory on his back. The list went on and on. Every company. Every platoon. Every soldier, really, because now, in July, as the explosions kept coming, and coming, the daily act of them jumping into Humvees to go out the wire and straight into what they knew was waiting for them began to seem the very definition of bravery."

""The only hope you have is to get her to an American hospital?" Cummings asked, repeating what Izzy had just said. Izzy started to answer. The cell phone went dead. "Izzy?" Cummings said. "Izzy?" How did moments of decency occur in this war? "Izzy," Cummings said. "Bring your daughter here." That was how."

"What do the rules say? At the moment, anyway, no one seemed concerned one way or another: not the doctors, not the family, and not Cummings, who stood at the same spot he'd stood at as he watched Crow die, watching once again. […] The glass had been part of an apartment that no longer existed, in a section of Baghdad where the sounds that night were the sounds of mourning. But here on the FOB, the sounds were of a mother whose home was ruined kissing her daughter's face, and a father whose home was ruined kissing his daughter's hand, and a little girl whose home was ruined saying something in Arabic that caused her family to smile, and Cummings saying quietly in English, "Man, I haven't felt this good since I got to this hellhole.""

"This is a fascinating story, and Chivers, a New York Times writer, tells it very well. He exploits his firearms expertise and combat experience as a Marine officer and later war correspondent to explain how the arcane science of ballistics and weapons design has impacted on the battlefields of the world. My only regret about his work is that he has superimposed upon the history of the contest between the AK-47 and M-16 a wider examination of the history of machine guns, which seems an unnecessary diversion...Chivers has written the best book so far about what is probably the most influential weapons system of our times."

"As Ismay finished his service commitment with the Navy in 2010, he read a New York Times piece detailing the complex origins of weapons found inside a Taliban gun locker. He then began corresponding with C. J. Chivers, the paper’s longtime conflict and arms reporter who wrote the piece. Ismay calls him Chris, but for seven years ending in 1994, he was Captain Chivers, a Marine infantry officer who served in the Gulf War."