Quotes About James Joyce

#1. [James] Joyce ... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized ...

Tom Stoppard

#2. James Joyce once called Guinness stout "the wine of Ireland." Indeed it's one of the most successful beers worldwide. Ten million glasses of this ambrosial liquid are consumed with great gusto each day.

Rashers Tierney

#3. James Joyce seemed like the most arrogant man who ever lived, had both his eyes wide open and great faculty of speech, but what he say, I knew not what.

Bob Dylan

#4. I'm drawn to women who live in a world different from my own. I don't believe you have to marry someone from your own backyard. James Joyce married a woman who never read any of his books.

Matt Dillon

#5. Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

Victor LaValle

#6. The words I speak to these chairs
must be silencing.
It has stunned them
into a profound emptiness.
No creaking from the gallery
no James Joyce here, nor Malory
An unknown author
in a very large chain
can't you hear me rattling?

B.J. Ward

#7. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.

Frederick Lenz

#8. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov

#9. James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

Samuel Beckett

#10. The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses]

Virginia Woolf

#11. James Joyce's Ulysses

Pamela Paul

#12. Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

Brendan Behan

#13. I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce.

Frederick Lenz

#14. When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

Sylvia Plath

#15. The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.

Hal Duncan

#16. I'm a postmodern commentator, and so, in a cheeky parallel to James Joyce or James Kelman, I get to places, verbally, that are a little unusual - when I talk about Jocky Wilson and end up sounding like a Jackson Pollock of the commentary box.

Sid Waddell

#17. Forget physics, forget organic chem, forget reading James Joyce's Ulysses - organizing your time is one of the biggest challenges you'll face in your academic career.

Stefanie Weisman

#18. For me, it's all about The Dubliners by James Joyce. I love The Dead.

Evan Dando

#19. I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

Juan Felipe Herrera

#20. There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

Sinclair Lewis

#21. Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Rebecca West

#22. Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

Pamela Paul

#23. Chuck Norris doesn't need to understand the work of James Joyce; James Joyce needs to understand the work of Chuck Norris.

Brian Celio

#24. James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

Werner Herzog

#25. Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

Hal Duncan

#26. The origin of the name is an enigmatic quotation from James Joyce: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Stephen Hawking

#27. James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Samuel Beckett

#28. Careful, Arturo Bandini: don't strain your eyesight, remember what happened to Tarkington, remember what happened to James Joyce.

John Fante

#29. To pass the time, I made valiant strides in my effort to read Ulysses, but feared I was losing the war. A hundred pages in, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that James Joyce might have been an asshole, and by Nebraska I was in a foul mood.

B. Justin Shier

#30. [On working with James Joyce:] So, either you run your publishing business far away, where your writer can't get at it, or you publish right alongside of him - and have much more fun - and much more expense.

Sylvia Beach

#31. Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

Matthew Specktor

#32. James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare
but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.

James A. Baldwin

#33. If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.
John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.

John McGahern

#34. Then he spoke of James Joyce. He told about Joyce's family, his religion, his education, his writing. He spoke of a book called Dubliners and a story in the book titled "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." Regardless of race, regardless of class, that story was universal, he said.

Ernest J. Gaines

#35. We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

David Lagercrantz

#36. He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

William S. Burroughs

#37. I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

Matthew Specktor

#38. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.

Philip Pullman

#39. My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness - what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!

D.H. Lawrence

#40. The God I do believe in is the God who doesn't care: James Joyce's God who stands back, paring his fingernails.

Roger Rosenblatt

#41. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

Italo Svevo

#42. I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it.

Kevin Myers

#43. Nora Barnacle is not a very interesting person." So said Richard Ellmann, author of the definitive James Joyce biography, to Brenda Maddox, author of the only Nora Barnacle biography, who quoted him to me.

Jessa Crispin

#44. James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.

Edward Abbey

#45. A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

James Patterson

#46. Where are you getting your material - Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking

Laura Lippman

#47. I don't go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called 'Finnegan's Wake.'

Johnny Depp

#48. It doesn't matter if you prefer reading James Joyce or "James and the Giant Peach." Those who read more read better.

Danny Brassell

#49. Mistakes are the doors of discovery", by James Joyce. A similar one: "A man can be destroyed but not defeated" by Ernest Hemingway. Both remind me that our biggest mistakes are the experiences we learn the most from. Hope to improve gives everyone the desire to live the next day, doesn't it?

Robert Pattinson

#50. I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#51. I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice ... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

Frank McCourt

#52. If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

Frank Delaney

#53. Tenors get women by the score.

James Joyce

#54. I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

James Joyce

#55. The world is before you

James Joyce

#56. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

James Joyce

#57. Ena milo melomon, frai is frau and swee is too, swee is two when swoo is free, ana mala woe is we!

James Joyce

#58. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

James Joyce

#59. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.

James Joyce

#60. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put money in thy purse.

James Joyce

#61. What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?

James Joyce

#62. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

James Joyce

#63. My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

James Joyce

#64. Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

James Joyce

#65. First we feel. Then we fall.

James Joyce

#66. Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

James Joyce

#67. Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

James Joyce

#68. Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

James Joyce

#69. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

James Joyce

#70. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.

James Joyce

#71. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla,shrieking like voices: -Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!

James Joyce

#72. Love ... is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself

James Joyce

#73. That is god ... A shout in the street,' Stephen answered ...

James Joyce

#74. He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.

James Joyce

#75. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me.

James Joyce

#76. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

James Joyce

#77. I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

James Joyce

#78. Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

James Joyce

#79. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.

James Joyce

#80. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age; and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day..

James Joyce

#81. This is the way to the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out.

James Joyce

#82. It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.

James Joyce

#83. Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat.

James Joyce

#84. No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.

James Joyce

#85. The trees do not resent autumn nor
does any exemplary thing in nature resent its limitations.

James Joyce

#86. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

James Joyce

#87. The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

James Joyce

#88. The shortest way to Tara is via Holyhead

James Joyce

#89. The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!

James Joyce

#90. My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

James Joyce

#91. And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

James Joyce

#92. He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the shaggy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.

James Joyce

#93. Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

James Joyce

#94. There's no police like Holmes.

James Joyce

#95. You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

James Joyce

#96. You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

James Joyce

#97. - Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

James Joyce

#98. I think of you so often you have no idea.

James Joyce

#99. Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

James Joyce

#100. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said I shall express myself as I am.

James Joyce