I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.
I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.
You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.
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.
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.
The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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.
I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize.
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.
You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.
When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.
Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc. . . ) and their truths don't "count" as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature.
When Larry Wright won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower we all strutted around for weeks, until some sourpuss among us noted that it was actually Larry, and not the rest of us, who won the prize.
Like I said, you guys in the media will treat the dumbest jack**s in the entire f***ng world like they won a Pulitzer prize for journalism and will put that level of weight on it, like they're an ambassador to some country we're trying to establish trade with.
I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.
Imagine Pulitzer prizefighting.
All that a Pulitzer really does is give the obit writers something to put between the commas after your name.
I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.
