Nobel Prize Literature Laureate Speeches by Michalle

Which French writer said this at the 1957 Nobel Banquet? "Often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge."

Which Scandinavian author said this at the 1955 Nobel Banquet? " I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams. Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child."

Who authored this telegram which was read at the Nobel Banquet in 1913? He is considered by many as the first songwriter to win the prize, preceding Bob Dylan by over a century... "I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother."

Which American writer said this, at the Nobel banquet in 1993? "Early in October an artist friend left a message which I kept on the answering service for weeks and played back every once in a while just to hear the trembling pleasure in her voice and the faith in her words. 'My dear sister," she said, "the prize that is yours is also ours and could not have been placed in better hands.' The spirit of her message with its earned optimism and sublime trust marks this day for me."

Which poet said this, at the Nobel Banquet in 1971: "I return to the streets of my childhood, to the winters of South America, to the lilac gardens of Araucania, to the first girl I held in my arms, to the mud on the streets which knew no paving, to the Indians mourning-clad left to us by the Conquest, to a country, a dark continent seeking for the light. And if the beams from this festive hall cross land and sea to light up my past, they also light up the future of our American peoples, who are defending their right to dignity, to freedom and to life."

Which most recent Literature Laureate said this at the Nobel Banquet in 2017? "I remember vividly the large face of a foreigner, a Western man, illustrated in rich colours, dominating the whole page of my book. Behind this looming face, to one side, was smoke and dust from an explosion. On the other side, rising from the explosion, white birds climbing to the sky."

Who said this at the Nobel Banquet in 1923? "Thirty years ago a number of Irish writers met together in societies and began a remorseless criticism of the literature of their country. It was their dream that by freeing it from provincialism they might win for it European recognition. I owe much to those men, still more to those who joined our movement a few years later, and when I return to Ireland these men and women, now growing old like myself, will see in this great honour a fulfilment of that dream. I in my heart know how little I might have deserved it if they had never existed."

These words appear in which writer's refusal of the Nobel prize in 1964: "The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case."

These words appeared in the speech honoring which writer that was given by a member of the Swedish academy in 1996? "During the long period of the ideological recasting of human consciousness, which we have just left behind us, some of Polish postwar poetry emerged as a sign of hope, a sewage treatment plant for mutilated and contaminated language - thus for the life of the mind and the perception of life as well. In the mere existence of poetic language, in the patient word-work of distinguishing genuine from sham, false tone from true, an entire society's purification process functioned and continues to function slowly, invisibly, underground."

Which 1988 Nobel Laureate in Literature gave the Nobel Lecture in which these words appear? They were read first in Arabic, then in the English translation you see here. "To begin with I would like to thank the Swedish Academy and its Nobel committee for taking notice of my long and perseverant endeavours, and I would like you to accept my talk with tolerance. For it comes in a language unknown to many of you. But it is the real winner of the prize. It is, therefore, meant that its melodies should float for the first time into your oasis of culture and civilization. I have great hopes that this will not be the last time either, and that literary writers of my nation will have the pleasure to sit with full merit amongst your international writers who have spread the fragrance of joy and wisdom in this grief-ridden world of ours."

Which American writer spoke the following words at the Nobel Banquet in 1950? "I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before"

Which American writer was responsible for these words, read at the Nobel Banquet of 1954: "For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you"