Frank Delaney Quotes

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'

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

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.

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

'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.'

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

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

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.

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.

Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

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.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

'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.

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.