Quotes About Joyce

No New York newspaper came to their defence or spoke out for Joyce.

Vico's terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce's ''two thinks at a time'' (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico's meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both.

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.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

I LOVE HORSES!' shrieked the Tooth Fairy over his shoulder.

Clive, at moments like this, had a smile like the lace in an old-style football. Anyone could be forgiven for wanting to boot it.

I am the lead on NBC's 'Siberia,' and I loved that experience.

I regret now that I didn't listen to their stories more closely, for they were yarn spinners, too.

He hablado en muchas partes de la impresión que me produjo esa lectura (el Ulises), pues la novela de Joyce fue algo mucho más importante y decisivo que una mera influencia: fue la Epifanía a de una vocación.

But Joyce proclaimed his vision as comic, seeing himself as 'red-nosed', not 'blue-jawed'. Of an international catastrophe, he said, with apparent flippancy: 'Now they're bombing Spain—isn't it better that I'm making a colossal joke instead?

Joyce saw perhaps what Wittgenstein felt—that 'Colours spur us to philosophize. [. . . They] seem to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us — not one that disturbs us.

For me, it's all about The Dubliners by James Joyce. I love The Dead.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

One would have thought that not even Joyce could have maltreated a salad to the point where it became inedible, but one would have been wrong. Abustle with wild life, it was also soaked in a vinegary dressing. Barnaby lifted a soggy lettuce leaf. A small insect emerged, valiantly swimming against the tide.

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.

Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.

It [Joyce's "Ulysses"] plays on the reader's sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to "do it justice", as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.

My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.

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.

Language being the break with madness, it adheres more thoroughly to its essence and vocation, makes a cleaner break with madness, if it pits itself against madness more freely and gets closer and closer to it: to the point of being separated from it only by the "transparent sheet" of which Joyce speaks, that is, by itself—for this diaphaneity is nothing other than the language, meaning, possibility, and elementary discretion of a nothing that neutralizes everything.

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.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

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 is the only way of insuring one's immortality.