James Joyce Quotes

New York City has always had more in common with Paris or London than with Cincinnati.

I appreciate my city very much. When I go to America and Europe, and I tell everyone I'm from London, I'm proud.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

I see a lot of nice hotels, but I never really get to enjoy the cities, because I have to be on a plane the next day.

Toronto as a city carries out the idea of Canada as a country. It is a calculated crime against the aspirations of the soul and the affection of the heart.

There's always to me a universality - one of the things I learned early on as a journalist and a writer is that there's a universality in specifics. The more specific you get, the more universal it can be.

We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink; our hearts might dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons. Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.

Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.

I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and it is still home to me. My writing has taken me all over the world, but this is the place I come back to and the place where I find it easiest to write.

Education is not a function of any church or even of a city or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

As far as cities, I love London. I go to London very often because I think the young people there are very creative. I also love New York, of course, and the clash of different cultures you find there.

Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners.

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. But, as with Belfast it took me years to penetrate its outer ugliness and dourness, so with Dublin it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

I had really not been out of the United States much, except for Mexico. I thought, "Jesus Christ, this [Russia] is like a whole new world." Instead of writing Michael Jackson one-glove jokes, all I had to do was go to these weird places and keep my eyes and ears open.

Two days in this city is worth two months in New York.

I seem to respond most to places that are more cosmopolitan because of my Manhattan upbringing. Some of the major international cities I've visited, like Madrid, Rome and London, have a lot of similarities and "New York" elements while ... having their own flavor.

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that

The best education I've had in my life is to travel.

No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.

I've learned a lot just being around people who grew up so differently from me, which is cool. It teaches you how to be a lot more tolerant. The bigger your world is, the more tolerant and accepting you become, because you have friends from all walks of life. You learn to be a little bit less selfish.

You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.