God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.
— James Joyce
I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.
Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
Nations have their ego, just like individuals.
A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.
The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.
Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
A nation is the same people living in the same place.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
