Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

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

'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.

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

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

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

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

Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

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.

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

Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.

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

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.