Joyce Quotes

• 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

  Dirty, Cabbage, Juice

  Letter to Aldous and Maria Huxley, 15 August 1928, in H. T. Moore (ed.) 'Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence' (1962) vol. 2

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• And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

  James Joyce

  Morning, Tired, Heart

  James Joyce (2011). “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Thrift Study Edition”, p.158, Courier Corporation

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• What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.

  Martin Amis

  Perseverance, Wife, Style

  FaceBook post by Martin Amis from Aug 10, 2016

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

  Brendan Behan

  Umpires, Judging, Said

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• 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

  Sleep, Idols, Tower Of Babel

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.208, University of Toronto Press

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• I don't know much about cars," Joyce said, "but I think someone took my engine.

  Janet Evanovich

  Thinking, Car, Said

  Janet Evanovich (2009). “Lean Mean Thirteen”, p.134, Macmillan

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• Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said. Two sentences," said Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. "You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said. No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.

  James Joyce

  Mean, Order, Two

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• A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair. James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?' Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always? How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued. Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.' Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.' Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!

  Stephen King

  Writing, Men, Order

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• Come to me all who are weary and heavy burden.." Go to the throne, not the phone. The people on the other end aren't qualified to fix your problems, they don't know what they're doing either!!! ~ -Joyce Meyers

  Joyce Meyer

  Phones, People, Thrones

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• 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

  Men, Car, Burgers

  Janet Evanovich (2009). “Lean Mean Thirteen”, p.135, Macmillan

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• The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

  David Nicholls

  Facts, Yeats, Wilde

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.233, Villard

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• I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Thinking, Careers

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• Lord, what if I miss You? What if I miss You? What if I miss You? Oh, I'm so scared! God, what if I miss You? He answered simply, "Joyce, don't worry; if you miss Me, I will find you.

  Joyce Meyer

  Worry, Missing, What If

  Joyce Meyer (2016). “How to Hear From God: Learn to Know His Voice and Make Right Decisions”, p.128, Hachette UK

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• You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

  William Faulkner

  Baptists, Old Testament, Ulysses

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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• 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

  Brother, Memories, Believe

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• 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

  Believe, Book, Different

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• 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

  Senior, Couple, Writing

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• 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

  Teaching, Perspective, Trying

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• Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

  George Orwell

  Pedants, Poet

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.213, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

  Tom Stoppard

  Men, Indifference

  Travesties act 1 (1975)

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

  Rebecca West

  Men, Taste, Great Men

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.4, Open Road Media

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• History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Views, Psychology, Als

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• In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Book, Reading, People

  Ernest Hemingway, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (1986). “Conversations with Ernest Hemingway”, p.117, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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