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There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

I didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.

The prize money for first place was $2,800, but I didn't take it because I was still an amateur.

How did the Oscar change my life? What it did was that it gave me a new reality. And it let me know that an award wasn't going to change my life - that I had to be in control of changing my life.

The nicest part of the prize, perhaps, is the effect on my friends and family. Each of them feels proud and happy to have the relationship with me that they do. In a way, it's as though they received an award too, and I like that very much.

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.

I was never much of a one to win prizes... and certainly never placed too much value on their acquisition.

Awards are not something that I measure my work by. I've been so fortunate and I've gotten to do such terrific things that it seems petty to look back and say, 'Oh, I should have gotten that prize.' I don't look at it that way.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.