Quotes from James Joyce

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

History is that nightmare from which there is no awakening.

An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

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

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.

No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

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

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.

Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.