Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

From '86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, ''You would have made a great James Bond! Weren't you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been.'' Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn't say no to it this time around.

Does nobody understand?;"James Joyce

Dan: "Wow, I'm a complete idiot!" James: "Okay hold on, lemme get this on paper.

You're so violent. You watch James Bond.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together.

Erwin: "Where are you going?" James: "To my woom" Erwin: "Your WOMB? That's a long, tight trip!

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.

Dan: "Ya know when cats are fat they're bigger than the ones who aren't fat, did ya know that?" James: "No Dan I didn't. Please do expand" Dan: "Huh?

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all -- save ''a man with a red moustache,'' ''a young man in gray smoking a pipe.''

Joyce: How was your Christmas? Me: It was okay, There was one thing that I wanted that I didn't get. Joyce: What was that? Me: Sex. Joyce: I don't think Santa Claus could help you with that one. Me: No, but Mrs. Claus can!

Deborah: My friend said she might come to the next meeting. James: Is she hot? Deborah: No, but she's Canadian!

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

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.

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use --silence, exile and cunning.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Carter This is the United States of James Carter here. I'm the president, I'm the emperor, I'm the king. I'm Michael Jackson, you Tito

Why don't you write books people can read?;"Nora Joyce, to her husband James

I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you... but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

I have always hated that damn James Bond. I'd like to kill him.

Journalism consists largely in saying ''Lord James is dead'' to people who never knew Lord James was alive.

The ''paper tiger'' hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.

Humor is, I think, the sublets and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Mistakes are the portals for discovery.

I call that a scumhead.

God is a shout in the street.

I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words. and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.