Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

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

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

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?'

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

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.

Sportswriters. They were all my friends. They were racetrack guys and so was I.

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.

I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

'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.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.

I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.

Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.

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

'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that's why I keep rereading it.

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

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

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

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

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.

There is no entering into the secret thoughts of a man's heart.