A Quote by Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

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Essentially His Indifference James Joyce Man Notice Private Public Recognized Total Universally Wished

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Tom Stoppard
English - Dramatist
Born: July 3, 1937

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

Private choices are not private; they all have public consequences...Our society is the sum total of what millions of individuals do in their private lives. That sum total of private behavior has worldwide public consequences of enormous magnitude. There are no completely private choices.

James E. Faust

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

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

Edward Abbey

The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.

Patrick Kavanagh

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

Rebecca West

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

Samuel Beckett

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

Frank Delaney

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

H. L. Mencken

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 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

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 dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.

Milton Babbitt

A Quote by Tom Stoppard

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