Explore Quotes by James Joyce

Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.