Top 147 Joyce Quotes & Sayings

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

I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

I don't know much about cars," Joyce said, "but I think someone took my engine.

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

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.

When I read about Joyce, I realised that there was no eight-till-one in his life: it was 24 hours a day for him.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

Martin Joyce is a beautiful dancer and an amazing choreographer. He choreographed the Mulberry dance film I was in, 'From London with Love.' A truly talented man.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

A souvenir of those years is a small cottage on the cliffs of Cornwall, where Joyce and I spend a spring month every year, hiking and seeing friends.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.

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.

In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.

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

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

Not since Cassandra Wilson's Blue Light Til Dawn has a vocalist cast such an entrancing spell as Valerie Joyce does on New York Blue.

Misogyny not only for Joyce Banda but for women.

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.

Jesse Joyce is a great writer.

Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

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

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

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

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

To me, there is no more conscientious umpire in the Major Leagues than Jim Joyce. He gives you a hellacious effort every time.

One of the most practical utensils I can't live without is my 'Joyce Chen' Scissors. They cut with precision.

People have always told me a lot that I remind them of Joyce DeWitt.

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.

When I think of the name 'Joyce' I think of a grandma or an old chubby Mrs. Claus.

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.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

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!

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.

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

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

I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.

I love Joyce Carol Oates. I love Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle. Arthur Phillips is always consistent.

If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

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

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

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.

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.

Paper is like Joyce Carol Oates: white.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

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.