Ulysses

"A book that changed my life for a long time. The novel represents a vast expanse of the possibilities of fiction in terms of theme, style, characterization. The book represented freedom for me with epic set-pieces and a genuinely moving humanism pulsing beneath the playful and revolutionary surface post-modernism."

"It contains everything, nothing new has really been written since."

"[ Ulysses ] not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me, but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books."

"Read this book in every one of my adult decades and got something different from it each time. “Ulysses” isn’t a novel, it’s a life project, and like life itself, we embark upon it striving towards understanding it."

"I would say I understand maybe three of the zillions of allusions in this book. Still, I find it such a remarkable thing. Ulysses is an epic that loosely follows The Odyssey , but it’s populated by modern people with all their foibles and misdemeanors. It’s so intricate—and as I said, so much of it is over my head—but I love the way Joyce talks about the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible.’ You shut your eyes, open them again, and find the world continues without your witnessing it. It’s a..."

"The greatest work of modern English literature. It’s known for being complex and difficult, but in a way it’s very democratic: a story about what it is to be human as one middle-class guy goes about one day of his life in Dublin."