Just Saying No: Luminaries Who Have Shunned Awards<br />Explaining his rationale at the time, Mr. Sartre issued a statement from Paris in which he said, according to a paraphrase by The New York Times,<br />that "a writer must not accept official awards, because to do so would add the influence of the institution that honored his work to the power of his pen." Before the prize was announced, Mr. Sartre told the Swedish Academy, which bestows the award, that he did not want to receive it.<br />Ms. Lessing, who grew up in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, rejected the accolade as it was "given in the name of a nonexistent empire." Though she also turned down an Officer of<br />the Order of the British Empire honor, or OBE, she went on to accept the title of Companion of Honour for "conspicuous national service," as well as the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.<br />Whether Bob Dylan was inclined to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature became a topic of intense speculation in 2016, after he met the announcement<br />of his prize with a prolonged silence — declining, for two weeks, to accept or return phone calls from members of the awarding academy.<br />Here are some memorable examples: "I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse," may be Marlon Brando’s most famous line in "The Godfather,"<br />but when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed its Best Actor award on him for his title role in 1973, refuse was exactly what he did.<br />While he portrayed knights in his Monty Python years, he turned down an appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire or CBE, because, as he told<br />The Telegraph, "I think they are silly." The refusal of high British honors was less of a laughing matter for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.<br />" Ms. Andrews said at the curtain call of a matinee performance, declaring<br />that she would "stand instead with the egregiously overlooked." Tony Award officials in turn overlooked her withdrawal, and kept her on the ballot. that I have searched my conscience and my heart and find that I cannot accept this nomination,
