Top 100 Quotes About Joyce
#1. 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
#2. Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.
Debra Dean
#3. If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.
Frank Delaney
#4. Cat my dogs ef it ain't de powerfulest dream I ever seen," as Joyce, quoting Twain, copied in his notebook on Huckleberry Finn.
John "Book Of The Dark" Bishop
#5. I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.
Jack Kerouac
#6. For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.
George Steiner
#7. 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
#8. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.
Robert Anton Wilson
#9. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
Julian Barnes
#10. Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
#11. 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
#12. Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce are three of my biggest influences, all of them for their formal freedom and their ability to create mood. So those comparisons are immensely flattering and, of course, unearned.
Teju Cole
#13. 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
#14. It was the night that the power went out in Berkeley that he'd finished Joyce's Finnegan's Wake by the light of a candle. Sometimes you need to be forced to study what's right in front of you.
Anne Rice
#15. It doesn't matter if you prefer reading James Joyce or "James and the Giant Peach." Those who read more read better.
Danny Brassell
#16. I don't go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called 'Finnegan's Wake.'
Johnny Depp
#17. He could usually get outdoors without waking Momma or Ellie or Brenda or Joyce Ann.
Katherine Paterson
#18. 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
#19. It's what Joyce Meyer calls, "New levels, new devils."2 Even if you conquer your fear of doing one thing, the moment you try something new, push your limits, or take on a new challenge, you're going to have a whole new set of fears that come with it.
Christy Wright
#20. 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
#21. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner
#22. James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
Edward Abbey
#23. Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.
Thomas C. Foster
#24. People have always told me a lot that I remind them of Joyce DeWitt.
Jane Wiedlin
#25. Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other; two gay guardian angels every human ought to have.
Sean O'Casey
#26. And then what do I do? Joyce asked, her voice suddenly pinched.
Anita Diamant
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Misogyny not only for Joyce Banda but for women.
Joyce Banda
#30. Jesse has opened for me extensively on the road so I've seen him do hundreds of sets. He is always super funny, has tons of material and the crowds love him. Bottom line, Jesse Joyce is a great comedian.
Greg Giraldo
#31. I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.
Marie Calloway
#32. I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
Mohsin Hamid
#33. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.
Italo Svevo
#34. Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Proust . . . Shakespeare
Harold Bloom
#35. The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.
Philip Kitcher
#36. 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
#37. The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
John Updike
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
Janet Fitch
#41. 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
#42. I don't know much about cars," Joyce said, "but I think someone took my engine.
Janet Evanovich
#43. After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.
Raymond Queneau
#44. 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
#45. When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.
Jonathan Ames
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare.
William Deresiewicz
#52. Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.
Giles Foden
#53. Not since Cassandra Wilson's Blue Light Til Dawn has a vocalist cast such an entrancing spell as Valerie Joyce does on New York Blue.
Bill Milkowski
#54. [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
#55. 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
#56. Careful, Arturo Bandini: don't strain your eyesight, remember what happened to Tarkington, remember what happened to James Joyce.
John Fante
#57. 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
#58. We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition - not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.
John Updike
#59. Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.
Edward Abbey
#60. I don't want to come off like a girl scout and 'Isn't she sweet?' but the honest-to-God truth is I had seven years of a great show. It put me on the map. Yes, I'm associated with Joyce, but this is not chopped liver.
Veronica Hamel
#61. The origin of the name is an enigmatic quotation from James Joyce: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Stephen Hawking
#62. The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
Alberto Moravia
#63. 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
#64. [James] Joyce ... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized ...
Tom Stoppard
#65. 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
#66. My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.
John Ortberg
#67. Cyrus's momma thinks I'm a gift from God. I didn't have the heart to tell her if I was then God was guilty of handing out gag gifts, Joyce said.
Carolyn Brown
#68. 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
#69. Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
Victor LaValle
#70. 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
#71. As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.
Philip Levine
#72. Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
George Orwell
#73. If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.
Frank Delaney
#74. Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
Marshall McLuhan
#75. 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
#76. Music is stored in our long-term memory. When we learn something through music, we tend to remember it longer and believe it more deeply. Dr. Joyce Brothers
Joyce Brothers
#77. You always did have a problem with undies. Remember when you wet your pants in the second grade?
- Joyce Barnhardt
Janet Evanovich
#78. Life direct ... is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.
Marvin Mudrick
#79. 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
#80. James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
Samuel Beckett
#81. The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses]
Virginia Woolf
#83. Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.
Brendan Behan
#84. A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.
Declan Kiberd
#85. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.
John Munro Woolsey
#86. I'd heard Joyce Grenfell on the radio, and when Mum gave me a book of her comic routines, I just loved it. Me and my sister shared a bedroom, and every night I'd drive her mad with my version of 'George, Don't Do That' about people we knew at school.
Dorothy Atkinson
#87. The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.
Patrick Kavanagh
#88. Bitch."
"Slut."
"Whore."
"Cunt."
I kicked Joyce in the shin. I draw the line at cunt.
Janet Evanovich
#89. I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce.
Frederick Lenz
#90. 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
#91. The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.
Hal Duncan
#92. Did you take Joyce's engine?'
'My instructions were to disable the car, but one of the men bet Hal a burger he couldn't get the engine out. So Hal removed the engine.
Janet Evanovich
#93. 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
#94. I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.
Grace Paley
#95. Packed up the Dylan and the Man Ray and the Joyce
I left a note that said well I guess I got no choice
Scuse me girl while I'm kicking it to the curb
Leaving with all I need but less than I deserve
Walter Becker
#96. Do not try to sidetrack me with sarcasm and a murder," Joyce said. "Mom.
Jenn McKinlay
#97. Chuck Norris doesn't need to understand the work of James Joyce; James Joyce needs to understand the work of Chuck Norris.
Brian Celio
#99. I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Joyce Carol Oates
#100. All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
Jonathan Safran Foer
