Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”

Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on how our certitudes keep us small and the generative power of not-knowing:

Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

When Toni Morrison became the first African American woman awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, she delivered this magnificent speech on the power of language:

Nobel Lectures in Literature, 1968-1980

Sture Allen

“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

Saul Bellow’s spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech on how art enlarges the human spirit:

Nobel Writers on Writing

Ottar G. Draugsvold

“The creative instinct is … an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual… — an energy which no single life can consume.”

December 12, 1938: Pearl S Buck, the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on writing, art, and the creative impulse: