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.
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.
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.
God made food; the devil the cooks.
There is no past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
Thought is the thought of thought.
There are no friends like the old friends.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
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.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Redheaded women buck like goats.
For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
Life is too short to read a bad book.