Joyce Quotes - Page 4

• The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

  Stanley Crouch

  Moving, Airplane, Light

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• I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

  Don DeLillo

  Inspiration, Fiction, Way

  "Q&A: Don DeLillo / It's not as easy as it looks / DeLillo talks about writing plays, watching sports and movies, and defining love and death". Interview with John Freeman, www.sfgate.com. March 5, 2006.

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• The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill....[The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century....Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature.

  Kevin Myers

  Thinking, Skills, Two

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• The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

  Alberto Moravia

  Proust, Century, Novel

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• Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

  Annie Dillard

  Summer, New York, Writing

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.82, Canongate Books

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• The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

  George Orwell

  Believe, Tired, Stories

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: A patriot after all, 1940-1941”

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• Paper is like Joyce Carol Oates: white.

  Caryl Churchill

  White, Paper, Carols

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• 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

  Men, Land, Example

  "Was the 20th Century a Mistake?". Interview with Paul Holdengräber, www.nypl.org. February 16, 2007.

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• If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

  Alexander Theroux

  Faces, Firsts, Facts

  Alexander Theroux (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.527, Fantagraphics Books

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• I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.

  Philip Roth

  Crazy, Lunch, Trying

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Sep 01, 2013

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• 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

  Falling In Love, Wind, People

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

  Frederick Lenz

  Book, Thinking, Rama

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• 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

  Writing, Years, Style

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• 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

  Book, People, Language

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• In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

  Tom Peters

  Morning, Business, Writing

  "The Peters Principles". Interview with Virginia Postrel, reason.com. October 1997.

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• 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

  Snakes, Leaving, Skins

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• 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

  Mean, Pride, Unique

  "What Is the Sangha?: The Nature of Spritual Community" by Sangharakshita, (p. 136), 2001.

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• What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth.

  Stephen Fry

  Art, Pride, Thinking

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• 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

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• 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

  Paradise, Fairy Tale, Ulysses

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2012.

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• James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.

  Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh

  Song, Thinking, Different

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• Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Self, Suits

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3669, Delphi Classics

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• When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

  Agnes Varda

  Virginia, Years, People

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred.

  Sylvia Beach

  Thinking, Games, Sight

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• [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

  Running, Fun, Far Away

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