A Quote by Stephen Dobyns

I had a period when I read Nobel Prize winners. I figured they had to be good. I discovered some people I didn't know about, like the Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness, who wrote "Independent People." .

Stephen Dobyns

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Stephen Dobyns
American - Novelist
Born: February 19, 1941

I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.

Jonathan Franzen

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

Nadine Gordimer

If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you'll find a fair smattering of people who don't know how to work a pipette.

Aubrey de Grey

I like Halldor Laxness and Machado de Assis - people who try to understand the human condition by looking at intimate pictures of human life.

Thomas McGuane

Two years ago I was on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to my close friend, the writer Liu Xiaobo, who is imprisoned in China. To me it was confirmation that universal values and a moral code do exist, and that the point of the Nobel Prize is to encourage writers to stand up for this moral code. Last Thursday I was once again on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to Mo Yan. He is a state poet. I am utterly bewildered. Do these universal values not exist after all?

Liao Yiwu

Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion.

Wole Soyinka

The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people... than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature.

Jack Steinberger

My co-winners, Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, and I wish to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for this very great honor. We each feel privileged and humbled to be named the winners of the 2010 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Dale T. Mortensen

The roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners, though it has some strange people on it from time to time, tends to feature folks who fought for social justice in a nonviolent and constructive way somehow.

Guy Burgess

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.

Anne Roiphe

I won't lie, I didn't know there was a concert. I've always known about the Nobel Peace Prize and the different prizes given out for science and this and that, but I didn't know there was a concert the day after. When they said, 'You're going to perform in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize concert,' I was like, 'All right, I'm there.'

Luis Fonsi

My first reaction on being awarded the Nobel Prize was, actually, I thought of Fischer Black, my colleague. He unfortunately had passed away. And there was no doubt in my mind that if he were still alive, he would have been a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize.

Myron Scholes

We [Corbis] make it so easy to call up images, whether art or people or beaches or sunsets or Nobel Prize winners.

Bill Gates

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.

Mario Vargas Llosa

As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.

Ernest Hemingway

Of course, today at the Karolinska Institute, I am working with some top experts - even some Nobel prize winners. They have the latest news and I have the technique.

Lennart Nilsson

A Quote by Stephen Dobyns

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