Award Acceptance Speech Quotes

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book." (Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. '…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children. (from the author's acceptance speech for the Caldecott award)

(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters): "Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the dance, but to the waiting, in a long line for horseless vehicles of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport. P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Tomkins who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious creature." "With gratitude and apologies to Miss Austen, thank you.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

[The] reader is not primarily interested in plot. He is interested in what happens because he is interested in the character it happens to. No incident has any place in the story unless it has an emotional impact on the character--and on the reader. Newbery Acceptance Speech

Holmes, too, continued to embrace an exalted image of herself. In her acceptance speech at Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year Awards at Carnegie Hall, she held herself up as a role model for young women. “Do everything you can to be the best in science and math and engineering,” she urged them. “It’s that that our little girls will see when they start to think about who do they want to be when they grow up.

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved. Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, only five Americans had previously been so honored. Accepting the prize in Stockholm, he gave an impassioned speech in which he argued that “the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religious order. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young people into an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.

I thought, for certain, that Billy would be the one to give the acceptance speech. But Daisy went up to the mike instead. I thought, I hope she says something coherent. And then she did. “BILLY: She said, ‘Thank you to everybody who listened to this song and understood this song and sang it along with us. We made it for you. For all of you out there hung up on somebody or something.’ "CAMILA: ‘For everyone hung up on somebody or something.

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.

Steven Burrows, head of the Intellectual Property Department, was there too. He'd earned the nickname "Seven" because of an acceptance speech he gave during an awards dinner for The Top 40 Lawyers Under 40, announcing that his greatest accomplishment did not relate to his practice, but instead was when he engaged in all seven deadly sins in one day.

The best movies leave audiences feeling glad to be alive, human, and reaching out to one another.”—ROBERT WISE, AFI LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

After de Havilland handed him the award, Matthau began, rather formally, “Uh, when one is nominated for an achievement award in any field of endeavour, I suppose it’s natural that one immediately starts thinking of an acceptance speech in the event that one wins. I must confess that I’ve given the matter some thought, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything.” After a burst of audience laughter, he continued, “However, my wife” – and he paused right here, for added emphasis – “wrote something for me.” He removed a piece of paper from his breast pocket, which he began reading: “This award, which I have won tonight, is due in no small part to the constant inspiration and selfless devotion of one beautiful, wise, witty, charming, and rich girl whose being is a monument to pure love. Carol Matthau, thank you.” As he read the note, he paused after each phrase. […] Matthau earned the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Best Actor Tony for The Odd Couple… Just as he did in his earlier Tony Award acceptance speech, Matthau declared that his words were composed by Carol. In what Variety described as a “poker-faced reading,” he managed to cleverly work in the names of his children, mother-in-law, and wife.

an unlikely pair of guests: Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about beatniks and sexually transmitted diseases that had upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight.

adies and gentlemen, 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. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth. Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low. Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net. As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, "The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred.

Mankiewicz quipped back that his acceptance speech would have gone, “I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles’ absence because the script was written in Mr. Welles’ absence.