A Quote by Rebecca West

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Rebecca West

Quote Topics

Entirely Great Great Man James Joyce Man Taste Without

Quote Author

Rebecca West
Irish - Author
December 21, 1892 - March 15, 1983

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

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

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

Virginia Woolf

I don't go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called 'Finnegan's Wake.'

Johnny Depp

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

Frank Delaney

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

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Tom Stoppard

Without wanting to claim that I'm really like James Bond I would certainly prefer to be thought of as closer to James Bond than Mr. Bean most definitely.

Rowan Atkinson

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

Werner Herzog

Chuck Norris doesn't need to understand the work of James Joyce; James Joyce needs to understand the work of Chuck Norris.

Brian Celio

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

I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said. Two sentences," said Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. "You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said. No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.

James Joyce

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov

I'm a postmodern commentator, and so, in a cheeky parallel to James Joyce or James Kelman, I get to places, verbally, that are a little unusual - when I talk about Jocky Wilson and end up sounding like a Jackson Pollock of the commentary box.

Sid Waddell

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.