James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet.

See also:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Ulysses (1922)

• Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
  • "James Clarence Mangan" (1902), a lecture on Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin (1 February 1902) and printed in the college magazine St. Stephen's

• Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
  • "James Clarence Mangan" (1902)

• Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.
  • "James Clarence Mangan" (1902)

• I saw through him telling me all the lovely places we could go for the honeymoon Venice by moonlight with the gondolas and the lake of Como he had a picture cut out of some paper.
  • “Ulysses” (1922)
• There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
  • Letter to Augusta Gregory (22 November 1902), from James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959) [Oxford University Press, 1983 edition, ISBN 0-195-03381-7] (p. 107)

• All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.
  • Letter to Augusta Gregory (22 November 1902), from James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959) [Oxford University Press, 1983 edition, ISBN 0-195-03381-7] (p. 107)

• My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
  My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
  • From the poem I Hear an Army

• Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.
  • "A Suave Philosophy," in Daily Express, Dublin (6 February 1903), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 67

• Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
  • Notebook entry, Paris (28 March 1903), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 104

• The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove.
  • "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," lecture, (27 April 1907), Università Popolare, Trieste, printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 123

• I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
  • "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (27 April 1907), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 125

• To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.
  • "Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe - William Blake)," lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (February 27-28, 1912), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 179

• Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
  • "The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England's Safety Valve in Case of War," Piccolo della Sera (Trieste, 5 September 1912), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 203

• Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
  • Notes (1913) made by Joyce for his play Exiles

• You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
  • Exiles (1915), Act II

• Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
  • Letter to Fanny Guillermet (Zurich, 5 September 1918)

• I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
  • Said in conversation with Frank Budgen, Zurich, 1918, as told by Budgen in his book James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" (1934), ch. IV

• The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.
  • To Djuna Barnes, in an interview published in Vanity Fair (March 1922)

• One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.
  • Referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (24 November 1926)

• Does nobody understand?
  • Last words (January 1941)

• If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. 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.
  • Joyce's reply for a request for a plan of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann

• The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
  • Interview with Max Eastman in Harper's Magazine, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann. Eastman noted "He smiled as he said that — smiled, and then repeated it."

• My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
  • Giacomo Joyce (1968)

• When I hear the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
  • Said in conversation with Frederic Prokosch and quoted in Prokosch's Voices: A Memoir (1983), "At Sylvia’s." Joyce was replying to Prokosch's statement that Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses was written as a stream of consciousness. "Molly Bloom was a down-to-earth lady" said Joyce. "She would never have indulged in anything so refined as a stream of consciousness."

• There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
  • To Jacques Mercanton, on the structure of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (1997) by Robert H. Deming, p. 22

• I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across... Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.
  • On Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (1997) by Robert H. Deming, p. 22

• I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.
  • About his wife, Nora. Selected Letters of James Joyce. [1]

• [Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.
  • James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25

• For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
  • Cited in Richard Ellmann (1983) James Joyce: New and Revised Edition, p. 505.

• Every night as I gazed up at the window I said to myself softly the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.
  • "The Sisters"

• I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
  • "Araby"

• But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
  • "Araby"

• Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
  • "Araby"

• She dealt with moral problems the way a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.
  • "The Boarding House"

• He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched upon him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.
  • "A Little Cloud"

• He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.
  • "A Little Cloud"

• Everything in Paris is gay
  • "A Little Cloud"

• But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.
  • "A Painful Case"

• One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.
  • "A Painful Case"

• One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
  • "The Dead"

• Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
  • "The Dead"

• And why couldn't he have a voice too? asked Freddy Malins sharply. Is it because he's only a black? Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera.
  • "The Dead" (adapted into a 1987 film), p. 198 (Penguin Books 1976 edition).
  • Setting: Dublin, Ireland. Author nationality: Irish. First published: London, England.

• I know all about the honour of God, Mary Jane, but I think it's not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads. I suppose it is for the good of the Church if the pope does it. But it's not just, Mary Jane, and it's not right.
  • "The Dead"

These are just a few samples, for more quotes from this work see its page

• History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
  • Ch. 2: Nestor

• It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness... (271)

• The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. (683)

• (Of Shakespeare) A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery (243)

• Boor, bond of thy herd,
  Tonight stretch full by the fire!
  • Tilly, p. 9

• Loveward above the glancing oar
  • Watching The Needleboats At San Sabba, p. 10

• Frail the white rose and frail are
  Her hands that gave
  • A Flower Given To My Daughter, p. 11

• How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
  Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
  • She Weeps Over Rahoon, p. 12

• The fragrant hair,
  Falling as through the silence falleth now
  Dusk of the air.
  • Tutto E Sciolto, p. 13

• Around us fear, descending
  Darkness of fear above
  • On The Beach At Fontana, p. 14

• And mine a shielded heart for her
  Who gathers simples of the moon.
  • Simples, p. 15

• Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
  Of sullen day.
  • Flood, p. 16

• Seraphim,
  The lost hosts awaken
  • Nightpiece, p. 17

• The sly reeds whisper to the night
  A name — her name —
  • Alone, p. 18

• Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
  Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
  • A Memory Of The Players In A Mirror At Midnight, p. 19

• Again!
  • A Prayer, p. 21

• The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. (4.14-15)

• Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. (4.15-17)

• But toms will till. I know he well.
  • Book I, Chapter 8
    • Note: 'time will tell'; 'I know he will / I know him well'

• But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus (12.32-33)

• For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Filstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor. (20.10-18)

• Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet worthy of the naym, came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another (29.30)

• in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world (83.10-12)

• the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke (the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting the authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) he canonicity of his existence as a tesseract. Be still, O quick! Speak him dumb! Hush ye fronds of Ulma!
  • p. 100

• In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
  • p. 104

• I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.
  • p. 113

• 'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry (115.36)

• (Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle.

• Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk's upset.

• Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing!

• Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess. (286.25-27)

• Quoint a quincidence! O.K. Omnius Kollidimus. As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber his grannyamother. Kangaroose feathers. Who in the name of thunder'd ever belevin you were that bolt?
  • p. 299

• Three quarks for Muster Mark! (383.1)
  • These lines were the source of the name of the particular entities known in modern physics as Quarks

• A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? A Successful Career in the Civil Service.
  • p. 306

• We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia. (410.20-23)

• In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen. (419.9-10)

• Thaw! The last word in stolentelling! (424.35)
  • (Finnegans Wake ends with the word 'the')

• He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim! (496.34 - 497.3)

• I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again. (625.27 - 625.29)

• End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (628.13 to 3.3)

Stephen Hero was an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, abandoned by Joyce in 1905, published posthumously in 1944.

• He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

• This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:
  —Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.

• Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. … No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.

• —You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so?
  — And then?
  —That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see?
  — Let us turn back, said Cranly.

• Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

• Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:
  — It has not epiphanised yet, he said.

• The English writers who had a big influence on me during my adolescence were Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.
  • Isabel Allende Interview

• Joyce accepted silence, exile, and cunning as a system which would sustain his life, and I've had to accept it too-incidentally, silence is the hardest part to understand.
  • 1970 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

• Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
  • James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son (1955)

• I did not mind remaining in the Tombs, for I was resting and enjoying an absorbing book Margaret Anderson had sent me. It was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, by James Joyce. I had not read that author before and I was fascinated by his power and originality,
  • Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)

• You know James Joyce said [in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] that he would forge the conscience of his race with "cunning, silence, and exile," and I have always thought that those were very weird things to say because how could you do it with silence? But maybe he means secrecy, because as far back as I could remember writing-I guess I was eight or nine years old-it was my secret thing to do. I'd hide my work and I would pretend I was doing something else, and I would write all the things that were forbidden to say. And then I just kept that up forever. I was very clear from a long time ago that I didn't have to share this with anybody-so that makes me very brave. I can always write it, throw it away, and I don't have to publish. But I do have to say it. Everything has to be expressed...Speaking of secrecy, did you notice that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison both began books with almost that same sentence: "You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you." " Alice Walker's novel [The Color Purple] begins: "You better not tell nobody but God," and then Toni Morrison [in The Bluest Eye] has the line, "Quiet as it's kept..." You see everybody has that same line; it's the same struggle to break through taboos, to find your voice. It's that same "exile, secrecy, and cunning" that Joyce was talking about.
  • 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

• I guess as a minority person in America, and with a lot of perceptions that English is not my language, there is a lot of leaving me out of this culture. So a lot of my work is appropriation. I'm going to appropriate this job and these books and this language-the American language. I'm going to appropriate this country. So a lot of the allusions are to say that the Joycean soul, this Rilkean romantic poetic soul, is mine. But the way that you're all talking, it seems like I put those allusions out there to give you pain and trouble. I meant them to be fun; that was my whole point. Maybe the greatest joy of my life is to read. I love it, it's pleasurable, it's sensual. So the allusions were just my playing with my books, you know.
  • 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

• In my conversation I make literary references all the time and in my head I make them even more I can hear Joyce and Shakespeare and Rilke. So why can't I use this in my writing? It's such a delight. It makes me really sad when there are so many readers who think it is off-putting to do allusions like that.
  • 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

• I would offer James Joyce as an example of an extremely interesting but enormously overrated writer who really had I very little influence on anybody because nobody can write like Joyce. Who would want to? Whereas Virginia Woolf, his exact contemporary of course, has been enormously influential, and underrated because she's not in the canon. She's in some people's canon, but she's not in the canon.
  • 1994 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin (2008)

• I really admired "Dubliners" a lot.
  • 1986 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

• The classical things are really quite marvelous, you know. It's just they have degenerated into a kind of "well-made-story" of our time. But you could learn forever from them...I get to one of Joyce's stories. So simple. So... so much happening in them to ordinary people.
  • 1980 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

• Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear.
  • Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

• And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up around his navel. None of that for me, thanks.
  • Hunter S. Thompson, in a letter to Lionel Olay (16 February 1962), published in The Proud Highway, p. 320.

• In English, you cannot even turn around a phrase or leave a dangling participle. Joyce needed to explode the English language to allow its occult meaning to emerge; Cortázar just plays around with Spanish words and grammar for the same purpose.
  • Luisa Valenzuela Interview with ‘’The Paris Review’’ (2001)

• [T]here were a lot of Americans, headed by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute gibberish. Then they hired a poor dotty Irishman called James Joyce, if you’ve heard about him - he was thought to be a great influence in my youth - and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books - only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge... [Y]ou could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder - but that was before the Americans hired him. And then they hired him to write Finnegan’s Wake, which is gibberish.
  • Evelyn Waugh Interviewby Elizabeth Jane Howard in the BBC television series Monitor in 1964

• I regard the two major male archetypes in 20th Century literature as Leopold Bloom and Hannibal Lecter. M.D. Bloom, the perpetual victim, the kind and gentle fellow who finishes last, represented an astonishing breakthrough to new levels of realism in the novel, and also symbolized the view of humanity that hardly anybody could deny c. 1900-1950. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim. Bloom, exploited and downtrodden by the Brits for being Irish and rejected by many of the Irish for being Jewish, does indeed epiphanize humanity in the first half of the 20th Century. And he remains a nice guy despite everything that happens...
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in "Previous Thoughts" at rawilson.com

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James Joyce

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