#ulysses

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses. ↗

— David Baker

#book #does #give #give me #grammar

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#george-orwell #influence #james-joyce #literary-criticism #literature

Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family. ↗

— Joachim du Bellay

#experienced #family #fine #golden #happy

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth. ↗

— Declan Kiberd

#james-joyce #joyce #literature #ulysses #art

Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. ↗

— James Joyce

#joyce #ulysses #imagination

(...) The new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Specch, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People. ↗

— James Joyce

#muses #music #opera #ulysses #music

In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring. ↗

— John Munro Woolsey

#legal #ulysses #respect

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. ↗

— Roddy Doyle

#any #books #could #done #doubt

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#elaborate #elite #fall #intellectual #obviously

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#astonishing #continue #epic #hears #his