Daily Inspiration Quote by James Joyce

Joyce is basically admitting that difficulty isn’t a side effect of his art; it’s part of the delivery system. The line has the swagger of a creator who knows he’s building not just novels but an industry of interpretation. “Enigmas and puzzles” frames the work as a kind of intellectual contraband: not meant to be consumed quickly, meant to be smuggled across time in the minds of readers who can’t let it go.

The target here is “the professors,” and it’s not exactly affectionate. Joyce is wryly outsourcing his afterlife to academia, betting that scholarly argument functions like a life-support machine for a text. He’s also mocking the apparatus even as he relies on it. The subtext: the modern author doesn’t get immortality through moral instruction or mass appeal, but through being unfinishable. If a book can’t be settled, it can’t be buried.

Context matters. Joyce wrote at a moment when modernism was turning fragmentation, allusion, and formal experiment into a response to a world that felt newly incoherent: empire wobbling, religion thinning, language itself suspect. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake don’t merely tell stories; they dare readers to keep up, then make “keeping up” impossible. That’s the trick. He turns interpretation into a perpetual-motion machine: every solution generates a fresh problem.

It’s cynical, but also honest about how canons are made. Culture remembers what it has to keep decoding.