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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• James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

  Samuel Beckett

  Writing

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• 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

  Kings, Book, Carols

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

  Edna O'Brien

  Book, Men, Numbers

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• Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

  Toni Morrison

  Fun, Block, Reading

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• 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

  Numbers, Poet, Persons

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• Life direct...is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Men, Artist, Together

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• Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Dream, Thinking, Thoughtful

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• 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

  Umpires, League, Giving

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• Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.

  Cornel West

  Powerful, Book, Class

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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.

  Martin Amis

  Teeth, Common, Poor

  Martin Amis (2010). “Experience”, p.116, Random House

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• 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

  Men, Literature, Today

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  People, History, May

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• 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

  Organization, Giving, Leader

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• A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

  Italo Svevo

  Pillars, Novelists, Proust

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• Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.

  Jonathan Raban

  Night, Thinking, Style

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• 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

  Art, Writing, Musical

  George Steiner (1991). “Real Presences”, p.224, University of Chicago Press

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• 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

  Genius, Censorship, Fragments

  Nadine Gordimer (2011). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.411, A&C Black

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Meaningful, People, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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