The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: “A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), the first major study of James Joyce's notoriously complex work.”
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell: “Paul's Epistle to the Romans and came across a curious sentence that seemed to epitomize everything Joyce had had in mind in Finnegans Wake.”
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: “Mitchell ... pulling out his Finnegans Wake”
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: “present to rosy youths Finnigan's Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's “incoherent transactions””
Just Kids by Patti Smith: “As when the corrected proofs of Finnegans Wake, left on a backseat within a maze of taxicabs, were magically returned to the hands of an astonished and grateful James Joyce.”
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth: “There is the worse than unreadable Finnegans Wake.”
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie: “So comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read Finnegans Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a 'flattened' world.”
Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag: “An example, perhaps the greatest example, is Finnegans Wake—still largely unread and unreadable...”
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson: “physicist Murray Gell-Mann drew the name 'quark' from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!'”
East, West by Salman Rushdie: “to please her I ploughed my way through Finnegans Wake twice”
Fury by Salman Rushdie: “made him plow his way twice through Finnegans Wake.”
On Literature by Umberto Eco: Cited as a work that influenced scientists' imagination of the universe
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “Finnegans Wake (because for a reader like me, there is almost no hope of finding in it a center)”
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy: “In the end Murray called the particles quarks—after a line in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, referring to cottage cheese.”