Literary Birthday – 7 December – Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary was born 7 December 1888 and died 29 March 1957.

Joyce Cary Quotes

1. For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.
2. I’ve been called a metaphysical novelist, and if that means I have a fairly clear and comprehensive idea of the world I’m writing about, I suppose that’s true.
3. Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
4. I don’t care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
5. A perfect God is the creation of a conceited man.
6. Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
7. No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.
8. I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.
9. It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know – and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.
10. Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another.

Joyce Cary was an Irish novelist. He developed a trilogy form in which each volume is narrated by one of three protagonists. His trilogy begins with the first-person narration of a woman, Sara Monday, in Herself Surprised and follows with that of two men in her life, lawyer, Tom Wilcher in To Be a Pilgrim and artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth.

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 by Amanda Patterson

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