“I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.”

“I don't know much about cars," Joyce said, "but I think someone took my engine.”

“MR. KHARIS: 'Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?'MR. CELINE: 'I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?'JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: 'You become facetious, Mr. Celine.'MR. CELINE: 'I have never been more serious.”

“If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”

“I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said. Two sentences," said Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. "You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said. No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.”

“As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime,” he said. “I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.”