Top 100 Pulitzer Quotes & Sayings

The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

The Pulitzer Prize was established when Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911, leaving a bequest to create the eponymous award. An immigrant from Hungary, Pulitzer struck it rich by combining the 'St. Louis Post' and the 'St. Louis Dispatch' to make the - wait for it - 'St. Louis Post-Dispatch.'

Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

We've been able to watch on our television screens sophisticated weaponry find a building; and we've seen dramatic reports from the front where Pulitzer Prize-to-be winning reporters stood up and declared, the United States is attacked, and all that.

You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.

When 'Next to Normal' won the Pulitzer, that was the moment I felt the show was being defined. There's a certain confidence that comes with being selected.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

There have been many great newspapermen, but to my mind, only two have achieved immortality: Pulitzer for his endowment and William Randolph Hearst for his castle.

As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it's in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

The Snowden story, which won the Guardiana Pulitzer Prize, became the realisation of Rusbridger's dream of a brand-building, left-wing-uniting, global and viral story.

One could get locked in by the Pulitzer, thinking, 'This is who I am.' Doors open with it, but doors in your mind could close.

According to a new book coming out by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, apparently when he was in high school, President Obama smoked large amounts of marijuana. You know what that means? He could be our first green president.

Warming up for the Brewers is that lefthander they got from the Mets, Bill Pulitzer.

The fact that Gene Weingarten and I and Bathroom Inventory are now part of some kind of Matrix of Poop strongly suggests that the Pulitzer is not what it once was.

I always love it when a small paper wins. When I was growing up in the Bronx, the editor of the Riverdale Press - a neighborhood rag - kept submitting his columns for a Pulitzer. We laughed and laughed at his ego. He finally won.

Imagine Pulitzer prizefighting.

Winning the Pulitzer is a really mellow, fabulous thing. You don't sit and wait for them to open an envelope. You already know you won, and you have a nice lunch. Oscars are more stressful. I had to sit for three hours and wait for my category. I had to fly to Los Angeles. For the Pulitzer I just had to go up to Columbia. But, while the president of Columbia gave me the Pulitzer, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck gave me the Oscar, so that was better.

Nothing concentrates the mind like a firm deadline, and a little voice in the back of my mind reminding me that, "If you don't write, you don't eat." We all want to be respected and appreciated, but when you get a big honor like winning the Pulitzer, people start to look for your work in a new way with higher expectations. Today, the best thing about having won is when I get a nasty comment from some internet troll I can remind myself of the Pulitzer and say, "Well, somebody appreciates me".

I'm fully aware that not every cartoon is Pulitzer material. That said, I'm proud of my Pulitzer portfolio, the 20 that got judged.

If I were a writer, the Pulitzer Prize would be important to me. This is my profession, so an Oscar is important.

I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize.

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as ''night, Mother.'

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

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.

I'm not doing Pulitzer Prize work where I'm unearthing major negative stories about the UFC or some big controversies. It's just kind of day-to-day fodder.

All that a Pulitzer really does is give the obit writers something to put between the commas after your name.

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

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'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

A Pulitzer Prize is awaiting the journalist who can find an American who dies of hunger, and probably the Nobel Prize for literature as well.

The great 'New York Times' columnist Dave Anderson famously slept one year in a child's race-car bed. There he was, Pulitzer Prize and all, snoring as his feet dangled over the rear tires of Lightning McQueen.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

If you found yourself in a situation where you could either save a drowning man, or you could take a Pulitzer prize winning photograph of him drowning, what shutter speed and setting would you use?

After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as 'night, Mother.'

Murder is illegal, but if you take a picture of it you may get your name in a magazine or maybe win a Pulitzer Prize. However, sex is legal, but if you take a picture of that act, you can go to jail.

Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.

One thing about winning a Pulitzer, it means you know what the first three words of your obituary will be: Pulitzer Prize-winner. After winning the Pulitzer, I couldn't help but notice how people suddenly looked at me with a newfound respect, and would say, "He's an expert." On the negative side, I developed a terrible case of writer's block for awhile, because I felt like readers would expect every one of my columns to be prize worthy.

Pulitzer's Gold is a goldmine of inspiration for both journalists and non-journalists. Those in the newspaper business, who now find themselves obsessing about staff cutbacks and circulation declines, should embrace this book as a reminder of the highest ideals, and the absolute thrills, to be found in their profession. As for regular readers, Pulitzer's Gold offers marvelous storytelling, real-life adventures, and absolute proof that journalism can change our world for the better.

I'm not ever getting a Pulitzer prize and my books aren't on high school reading lists, but for better or worse I'm a working writer.

People who go to Oxford and Cambridge are often unproductive. What am I saying? This is nonsense. No, sometimes they get so competitive that, unless they're going to be Pulitzer prize-winning, they can't get off their backside.

I did a play called 'Disgraced' in 2012 at Lincoln Center, which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. I played the lead character, a Muslim American, who had renounced Islam and became very anti-Islam.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.

My eyes widened at the ball of orange fluff squeezing out from under the counter, blinking and stretching. I looked again, not believing. “It’s a cat,” I said, winning the Pulitzer prize for incredible intellect.

There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.

I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.

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.

The Pulitzer isn't a physical object. You can't hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7,500 in my day), and you get a little Tiffany's paperweight with your name on it and the image of Joseph Pulitzer suspended in the crystal. When people see my 'Pulitzer' (I keep it in my sock drawer), they are pretty amazed at its meagerness.

You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

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.

I adore [my son]. I wouldn't trade him in for a Pulitzer - unless someone actually offered that as an option.

I think that no matter whether you're Quentin Tarantino or any other kind of a rebel, or whatever, everyone who makes movies still wants to win an Academy Award, because it's like the Pulitzer Prize or the Congressional Medal of Honor.