booker-prize-winners

"When we were younger, me, Marpessa, and the rest of the kids on the block would jet over to Hominy’s house after school, because what could be cooler than watching an hour of Little Rascals with a Little Rascal?"

"During Black History Month, my father used to watch the nightly television footage of the Freedom buses burning, the dogs snarling and snapping, and say to me, "You can't force integration, boy. The people who want to integrate will integrate." I've never figured out to what extent, if at all, I agree or disagree with him, but it's an observation that's stayed with me. Made me realize that for many people integration is a finite concept. Here, in America, "integration" can be a cover-up. "I'm not racist. My prom date, second cousin, my president is black (or whatever)."

"Problem is, they both disappeared from my life, first my dad, and then my hometown, and suddenly I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself."

"You're supposed to wolf whistle! Like this…” Recklessly eyeballing her the whole way, he pursed his lips and let go a wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled both the white woman's pretty painted toes and the dainty red ribbon in her blond hair. Now it was her turn. And my father stood there, lustful and black, as she just as defiantly not only recklessly eyeballed him back but recklessly rubbed his dick through his pants"

"Still, I don’t feel guilty. If I’m indeed moving backward and dragging all of [B]lack America down with me, I couldn’t care less."

"Massa…sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who just also happens to be an actor. But being black ain’t method acting.”"

"But where my father saw an opportunity for information exchange, public advocacy, and communal counsel, Foy saw a midlife springboard to fame."

"Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear."

"We’ll hear argument first this morning in case 09-2606…in case 09-2606, Me v. the United States of America."

"If the Allies had agreed to exchange Lorries millions of Jews would still be alive . I know this. I was in the Resistance. I was in touch with G.H.Q. middle east Cairo."

"I am from Israel.i am a journalist.i've been in the states on a trip ."

"In the U.K. you trusted people. In the main you took it for granted people acted decently. You made an assumption about the man who sat next to you on the Tube. You didn’t know for sure. You just assumed. Well, if you didn’t make assumptions like that how could you trust in the government? Townrow wanted to tell Mrsk K that trust in big things started with personal relations"

"You stopped me from doing something that shouldn’t be done. Well, you’ve got to make a start, haven’t you? I mean you’ve got to start with yourself. That’s all you know about. So you’ve got to start patiently putting one foot right and another foot right. That’s what I’m thanking you for."

"In March 1942 I was living in Budapest with my father and my uncle. Now we listened to B.B.C. of course why did your government not warn us about going on those trains?"

"When ever I see an Englishman I ask him this question.Never is there a good answer.i have vowed to put this question to every Englishman. It is what I owe to the dead"

"Keri Hulme, tena koe, whanaunga o roto o Ngai-Tahu, o Ngati-Mamoe! You have the nerve to leave the reader with the heart-ache of responding to the crying of many aching bones! What a dilemma! Ah! But what a wonderful piece of art you have created!"

"Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are. A peevish moment of wonderment as to where the real world lies. (chapter 1)"

"Years ago, an enthusiastic Australian critic tried to tell me how he felt on first reading Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. “He gave us ourselves!” he exclaimed. I now understand what he meant. Keri Hulme has given us – us."

"Hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk. (chapter 2, p71)"

"Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why. (chapter 3, p94)"

"Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth.... (chapter 6, p249)"

"They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are the instruments of change. (from the Prologue, p4)"

"There are strong echoes of Powell and Waugh, but Hollinghurst's richly textured narrative and achingly evocative prose is masterful and his alone."

"Hollinghurst moves characters between background and foreground in different sections, meticulously picking up figures, information, ideas strewn earlier to shine a different light on past and present alike: the technique of staggered information, always a mainstay of narrative, has been fashioned into something altogether more transformative, more pointed. It is woven with stupendous deftness, its internal assonances making a complex, comprehensive harmony."

"Carrying both this comedy and the book's angry elegies is Hollinghurst's beautiful prose, which mixes the colloquial and the aesthetic to produce a language at once physical, lyrical and austere."

"I was sent there Canford School] in 1967, at the age of thirteen, and at some point in my first year was issued with the OUP anthology Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold. This was my introduction to "Tintern Abbey", "Kubla Khan", Keats's Odes and many other poems which, read over and over, became and have remained a sort of inner music for me, whether purposely memorised or not. But the one of the fifteen who spoke most persuasively to my adolescent mind was Tennyson, in "The Lady of Shalott", "Ulysses" and the lyrics from The Princess; I won the junior reading competition with a passage from "Morte d’Arthur", making the most of the "sharp-smitten" clanging crags and "the long glories of the winter moon". Those effects, like many of Tennyson's best, are slightly over-orchestrated, a display of unrestrained assonantal genius, with a fascinating power of prickling the scalp, much treasured at that age, and for me never lost."

"[John Betjeman's] ability to make people laugh resounds through this book as persistently as church bells do through his poems."

"Other reviewers have noted the strong overtones in Hollinghurst's novel of Proust as well as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, but there is a distinctly Jamesian aura that plays around the stressed and complex analogies The Line of Beauty proposes among social privilege, social transgression, economic ravenousness, and inviolable commitments to pleasures of various kinds and intensities."

"When I first came here Hampstead Heath] I was starting my second novel, The Folding Star, which is a very twilight book, a time of day I've always loved. On those summer evenings when I set out on walks, I'd often end up on a bench here, analysing the changing light and the colours. There was a lot of pastoral poetry woven into that book; I think I was filling out an imaginary landscape based on the one in front of my house."

"In general men are very thoughtless creatures. Single-minded, rather. That is what life demands they should be, I think. You only have to take the example of primitive man as hunter and breadwinner. Life demands that he should be singleminded, and nature compensates him by giving him a supreme self-confidence in his ability as a hunter. All his thought is directed towards that end, and at the end is food for himself and his family, and protection for them all. His wife, on the other hand, depends on him for food and protection, but can't actually share his self-confidence from the inside where it matters. Oh - she can believe in him through the sort of vicarious self-confidence something like love can bring, but nature demands that she keeps alert for any slightest sign of failure in the man, because she depends on him for life and livelihood. "And so, Mr Canning, your so-called intuitive woman takes to watching and interpreting every shadow of expression on her man's face. If he's losing confidence, her training in observation detects it as surely as a wart on the end of his nose, and so she bolsters him up, praises him, pushes him, you see, into regaining confidence - and all for the most selfish reasons as you see - and off he goes with his chest out thinking what a fine fellow he is. He might even pause to consider how understanding his wife was, and no doubt he'd then shake his head in mystification and tell his neighbour that woman's instinct was a thing to marvel at. "But then the talent itself has its roots in anxiety, hasn't it? Just as a man's single-mindedness has its roots in hunger."

"She laughed. "You haven't changed a bit. You never could stand criticism or leg-pulling. That's why you bored me, Ian. That was the trouble with your generation of so-called intellectual young men. All of you unmitigated, bloody bores with sloppy ideas and no remotest idea how to come to terms with life. When you found life coming to terms with you, you all wondered what the hell had hit you.""

"I kept myself very much to myself, as one does if one is old and doesn't much care for the people round about."

"Every so often there's a generation likes us, Ian. Our only raison d'être to be blown to pieces in a war we imagine we believe in ideologically."

"It is said that every seven years of your life you undergo a change which reflects itself in your attitude to your circumstances and to other people, and I think this may be true. If it is, then the change begins towards the end of a seven-year span, at the point, perhaps, where dissatisfaction with what you are doing and with where you are going sets in."

"How ignorant one is when faced with essential practical matters. How they trick and trap you into holes and corners."

"He relapsed into a silence in which his hopes scattered like mice into holes."

"I often look back now and regret that I never took my courage in both hands and went out into the world. That's really what a chap should do, Canning. Get out and look. Otherwise," again he paused, "Otherwise you never really see yourself, old man. And it's all so small and petty. A man isn't a man any longer."

"I had the impression she had become unconscious of her surroundings and was watching the past flick by like a series of moving pictures, silent, uncaptioned; a gate here, a fence there; doors opening upon rooms sometimes empty, sometimes crowded; and stairs, endless, endless stairs down which one was afraid to go for the terror that awaited one's return."

"I was surprised, as one is, I think, whenever the tenuous thread of one's life suddenly connects, as friends, people one would have thought strangers."

"Have you literary ambitions of your own?" "I have dabbled in my time." "Dabbled?" Bluntly, salting my own wound, I said "I had no staying power, Mrs Hurst. Not for the things I wanted to do, at any rate. I imagined much, started little, finished nothing and published not at all." "I think you are too easily discouraged." "I had no original creative talent. In the field of what might be called literary research I had a sort of painstaking, plodding conscientiousness which simply meant I was well on my way to becoming a hack of sound judgment. A man could go on turning out fatuous tripe until the cows come home without necessarily knowing it."

"Time is quick. Life is short."

"Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories."

"To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness."

"What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?"

"Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive."

"What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things."

"If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom."

"Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind."

"Our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption and hunger are the bullets. Bad governments are the bombs."

"Craft is important. The greater the idea, the greater the craft you need."