Finnegans wake Quote by William Finnegan

“I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked.” quote by William Finnegan — Download Open image

““I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked.””

William Finnegan

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Writing is pretty flexible work, don't you think? If you want to surf, you just have to get a lot done when the waves…

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“When I finally came in and complained, she tried to explain, not for the first time, how exquisitely boring it was to watch surfing.…

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It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.

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“Surfing, to begin with, was not a “sport.” It was a “path.” And the more you poured into it, the more you got back…

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Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son.…

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I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject,…

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There are good waves not that far from Manhattan - on Long Island, in north Jersey. It's true that the best surf around here…

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I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in…

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I remember surfing in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, even Madeira, when local fishermen had never seen a surfboard before, and refused to believe that we…

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Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described,…

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More Finnegans wake quotes

“On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the…

Samuel Beckett

“My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second…

Roger Ebert

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

Dennis Miller

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For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every…

Philip Kitcher

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I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as…

Sylvia Beach

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

Leslie Fiedler

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Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded…

Toni Morrison

“I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped…

Frank Kermode

The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable.

Seamus Deane

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“In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one…

Murray Gell-Mann