Evan Dando Quotes

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

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

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

Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

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

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?'

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

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.

Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.

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

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

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

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

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.

As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'

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.