James Joyce

"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."

"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."

"I really admired "Dubliners" a lot."

"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."

"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."

"And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up around his navel. None of that for me, thanks."

"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."

"[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."

"Versteht es niemand?"

"Das Ziel des Künstlers ist die Erschaffung des Schönen. Was das Schöne ist, ist eine andere Frage."

"… meine Seele ist in Triest."

"Der längste Umweg ist der kürzeste nach Hause."