Joyce quotes:

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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
  • 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
  • Overall, I have formed three major organizations: the National Association of Business Women, the Young Women's Leaders Network, and the Joyce Banda Foundation. Under the foundation, we have a huge program that targets women to teach them about HIV and other diseases and to give them economic empowerment. -- Joyce Banda
  • Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant. -- George Orwell
  • The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. -- John Updike
  • Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste. -- Rebecca West
  • James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself. -- Samuel Beckett
  • I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce. -- Frederick Lenz
  • History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim. -- Robert Anton Wilson
  • For me, it's all about The Dubliners by James Joyce. I love The Dead. -- Evan Dando
  • If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man. -- Frank Delaney
  • All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
  • James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized. -- Tom Stoppard
  • A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. -- Italo Svevo
  • Chuck Norris doesn't need to understand the work of James Joyce; James Joyce needs to understand the work of Chuck Norris. -- Brian Celio
  • To me, there is no more conscientious umpire in the Major Leagues than Jim Joyce. He gives you a hellacious effort every time. -- Tony La Russa
  • What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. -- Martin Amis
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust. -- Allan Bloom
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
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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
  • [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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Jesse Joyce is a great writer. -- Dave Attell
  • Paper is like Joyce Carol Oates: white. -- Caryl Churchill
  • I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce. -- Frederick Lenz
  • People have always told me a lot that I remind them of Joyce DeWitt. -- Jane Wiedlin
  • I don't know much about cars," Joyce said, "but I think someone took my engine. -- Janet Evanovich
  • After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it. -- Raymond Queneau
  • Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius. -- Thomas C. Foster
  • You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith. -- William Faulkner
  • The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce. -- Alberto Moravia
  • My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously. -- John Ortberg
  • James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end. -- Edward Abbey
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots. -- John Guare
  • 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
  • A souvenir of those years is a small cottage on the cliffs of Cornwall, where Joyce and I spend a spring month every year, hiking and seeing friends. -- Philip Warren Anderson
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry. -- Simon Rich
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf. -- Michel Faber
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
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  • In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation. -- Teju Cole
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
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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
  • 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
  • Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective. -- Philip Kitcher
  • 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
  • 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
  • A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz -- James Lee Schmidt
  • 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
  • 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
  • Why'd you even think I'd read your diploma before, during, or after buying 10 copies of it in an all-you-can-drink online bar? - If I could drink what I read, I'd probably still be drunk on Joyce's Ulysses. I should've chased it with a racer.-Stefan D and Jarod Kintz -- Stefan D
  • 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
  • It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be. -- Joyce Carol Oates
  • 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
  • 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
  • Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce. -- Joyce Carol Oates
  • 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
  • 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
  • One day I was in Starbucks going through one of my books on accounting, and this beautiful young woman came up to me and said, 'My accounting book is different from yours.' Her name was Joyce, she had a background in finance and administration and ran a surgery center. Within a short time, we were married. -- David Schweikert
  • The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with 'Ulysses,' but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom. -- Karen DeCrow
  • No, I chose the name Jane Seymour because I was doing my first film, 'Ode to Lovely War,' and one of the top agents in England spotted me dancing in the chorus. I was a singer and dancer in that movie with Maggie Smith, um, and he told me he couldn't sell me as Joyce Penelope Willomena Frankenburger. -- Jane Seymour
  • 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
  • When I wrote 'Your Republic Is Calling You,' it was Franz Kafka's writing that I had most in mind, and James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Entirely out of the blue, Kafka's characters receive an order to go somewhere, and when they try to comply, they never quite manage it. Ki-yong in 'Your Republic Is Calling You' is precisely that sort of character. -- Kim Young-ha
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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
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