A Quote by Samuel Beckett

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

Samuel Beckett

Quote Topics

About His Itself James Joyce Something Thing Writing

Quote Author

Samuel Beckett
Irish - Novelist
April 13, 1906 - December 22, 1989

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

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.

Karen DeCrow

Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

Victor LaValle

The great thing about James Baldwin and his writing is that it's still fresh every time you pick it up. That's also the sad thing about his writing sometimes, too.

Brian Tyree Henry

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.

Edward Abbey

I would quite like to do something on Ireland about the culture, James Joyce, Yeats, persuade Seamus Heaney to have a chat and do some cooking.

Rick Stein

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

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

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

In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.

Frederick Lenz

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

Evan Dando

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

Italo Svevo

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

Tom Stoppard

I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

Juan Felipe Herrera

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.