16 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as James Joyce wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
James Joyce gave few interviews and guarded his talk, so most of what circulates over his name comes from two printed conversations: Djuna Barnes' profile in the April 1922 Vanity Fair, and Max Eastman's account in The Literary Mind. Every line above is checked against a scan of the original printing. His most-quoted sentences, though, come from the novels — Molly Bloom's closing yes, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” “silence, exile, and cunning” — and those are credited to the books they belong to, with their speakers named, on the pages for Ulysses, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
What Joyce wrote, in the National Library chapter of Ulysses, is: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” The words are Stephen Dedalus's, in the middle of his Shakespeare argument. The short form drops the speaker, the genius, and the claim that the errors are deliberate — which is most of the sentence's meaning.
The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.
They are all there, the great talkers, them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.
The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton—Parnell—never a man.
All great talkers have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde. He studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.
Hamlet is a great play, written from the standpoint of the ghost.
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.
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 defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
…and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Love loves to love love.
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Every book with a quote collection of its own, each line verified against the text.
The end of Ulysses: “yes I said yes I will Yes.” The words are Molly Bloom's, the character whose night-thoughts close the novel, so the line is credited to her on the Ulysses quotes page rather than to Joyce speaking as himself. Of the things Joyce actually said in his own voice, the best known is his remark to the American editor Max Eastman: “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
Not in those words. The sentence in Ulysses is Stephen Dedalus's: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” The short form drops the speaker and the point — that a genius errs on purpose — and does not appear anywhere in the novel's text.
Very rarely, which is why his verified spoken remarks nearly all trace to two printed conversations: Djuna Barnes' profile of him in the April 1922 Vanity Fair, drawn from months of café conversations as Ulysses appeared, and Max Eastman's account of talking with him in The Literary Mind (1931). Both printings are quoted above from scans of the original pages.
Two things, both to Djuna Barnes in 1922: that the public would insist on finding a moral in a book that, “on the honour of a gentleman,” contains not one single serious line — and, when she asked what the novel does, that it records simultaneously what a man says, sees and thinks, and what that seeing, thinking and saying does to the subconscious.
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
The April 1922 interview; wording checked against the Internet Archive scan of the issue (sim_vanity-fair_1922-04_18_2).
Eastman prints Joyce's reply and vouches that it came “in exactly these words.”
The complete text, searched for the attribution check.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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