In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the huma...n subject. I hope it may prove successful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a d...esk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind w...hen he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modern criticism has concerned itself more with poetry than with fiction for several reasons. First, fiction does not lend itself ...so readily as verse to the close analytical approach. Second, there is no body of critical theory upon the subject of fiction comparable to the poetic theory available to the critic of poetry. Third, the tremendous output of short fiction and novels tends to obscure the total picture and to make the initial problem of selection and evaluation extremely difficult. The result is that fiction, when it has been examined, has been subjected to the same criteria as those applied to verse; sometimes, as in the case of such authors as James, Joyce, or Kafka, with excellent results; at other times, with authors such as Tolstoi, Mann, or Hemingway, the results have either been bad or criticism has limited itself to discussion of the authors' lives, their social background, or their historical importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O Jesse had a wife, a mourner all her life And the children they were brave,... But the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard He laid Jesse James in his grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Johnny Rocco: Yeah, yeah, that's me. Sure, I was all of those things. And more! When Rocco talked everybody shut up and listened! ...What Rocco said went! Nobody was as big as Rocco! It'll be like that again only more so. I'll be back up there one of these days, and then you're really gonna see something! James Temple (with contempt): If the time ever comes when your kind can walk a city street in daylight with nothing to fear from the people.... Frank McCloud: The time has come, Mr. Temple. It's here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before the ...wind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »