C.F. Joyce Quotes

I'm happy about who and what I am - and I can't wait to find out who I'll be tomorrow.

A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.

What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination?

No doubt any connoisseur, any collector, some bored old millionaire when he shows off his treasures, is seeking in your praise the resurrection and the life.

No honest hardworking official likes to see good money disappearing into the hands of the Treasury at the end of the financial year.

The only good government... Is a bad one in a hell of a fright.

An old mans memories, like his bones, grow sharp with age and show their true shapes.

The principal fact of life is the free mind.

What I say to an artist is, 'When you can't paint - paint.

Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue.

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.

He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.

An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric.

I'll tickle his catastrophe.

Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his [Lucifer's] ruin.

The studious silence of the library ... Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.