Joyce Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Modern, Beckett, Wells

  Source: www.litkicks.com

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• The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful and repays the effort. I started reading it in high school, but I wasn't really able to grasp it. Then I read it in college. I once spent six weeks in a graduate seminar reading it. It takes that long. That's the problem. No one reads that way anymore. People may spend a week with a book, but not six.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, School

  Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.bostonglobe.com. March 23, 2013.

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• 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

  Writing, Different, Stylist

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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• 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

  Virginia, Signatures, Different

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• 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

  Roots, Switzerland, Where We Come

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Always Trying, Topography, Transition

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn't that cool.

  Felicity Jones

  Thinking, Virginia, University

  Source: www.shockya.com

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• The experimental film scene was very much misogynistic as well. I don't know if you have read what little attention was given to the films of Joyce Wieland, who was the wife of Michael Snow. Michael was the "genius" and she was not. If you look at the films they're wonderful, but very different. Michael was very proud of the films too, so it was not coming from him. It was coming from the general environment. I think both Chantal Akerman and I shared that. We wanted to find a language, which was the language of women.

  Babette Mangolte

  Thinking, Snow, Wife

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• So Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, these are all people who would sort of rearrange or take riffs from people. Same thing with rock, if you look at the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Otis Redding or you know if you look at literature James Joyce is pulling fragments of text from other people.

  DJ Spooky

  Rocks, People, Rolling

  "Big Think Interview With DJ Spooky". bigthink.com. April 08, 2010.

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• Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

  Philip Kitcher

  Good Life, Philosophical, Numbers

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

  Real, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I admire Joyce Maynard a lot, specifically her memoir "At Home in the World." Her writing is beautiful and fascinating and seemed to give me validation to the idea that I could write validly in earnest about my life with (my) very feminine point of view, and also that I could unapologetically explore the bad traits of my character (which I find to be more interesting to explore than the good traits), as well as explore other concepts that interest me like private vs public personas, age gap relationships, etc.

  Marie Calloway

  Beautiful, Home, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Book, Mitzvah, Bars

  "Ridiculously Rich: The Rumpus Interview With Simon Rich". Interview with Maureen Miller, therumpus.net. June 9, 2010.

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• 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

  Jeter, Fiction, Yeats

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• 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

  Three, Influence, Mood

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

  Teju Cole

  Beautiful, Moving, Writing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

  Fall, Character, Lasting Change

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

  Views, Careers, Fiction

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Believe, Book, Different

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• A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair. James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?' Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always? How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued. Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.' Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.' Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!

  Stephen King

  Writing, Men, Order

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• 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

  Phones, People, Thrones

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• 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

  Men, Car, Burgers

  Janet Evanovich (2009). “Lean Mean Thirteen”, p.135, Macmillan

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• The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

  David Nicholls

  Facts, Yeats, Wilde

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.233, Villard

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• I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Thinking, Careers

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