“Joyce's method of composition always struck me as more poetic than prose writer. His words were already in his mind before they found their final form on paper. Constant and indefatigable, he pursued the solution of some problem of Homeric correspondence, or of technical expression, or some character trait of Bloom or any other character in Ulysses. Or he needed some physiological fact that would give him the clue to some part of his epic of the human body. He was constantly looking or listening, searching for a fact or a word, and he believed very much in his luck. What he needed would come to him. What he collected would be useful to him at the right time and place. And since in a sense the theme of Ulysses is life in its entirety, the variety of materials she needed to build it was endless. He was not writing Ulysses in Dublin in 1904, but what he saw or heard in Zurich in 1919 served him just as well, since the forms of life remain constant, only clothes and customs change."

Frank Budgen

“Ulysses is a labyrinth that can be entered from anywhere, once we have internalized the general plan and its resolution. It is one of the very few books that can be read at any time, enriching it in a unique way, and unlike those volumes you have to deal with in the library, it is a book for the bedside table. Saying that you have to live with it is not making an arbitrary and tendentious claim, but simply pointing out objectively that there is enough meat in it to last a lifetime.”

Anthony Burgess

“Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses has its own technique, which would require a special analysis. However, they all have a common feature: each passage, each phrase, each fragment only becomes intelligible if it is related to others. Here, too, the affinity that Joyce's work has with music is shown. You have to read Ulysses as a score; it could even be printed as such. To really understand Ulysses, one would have to keep the entire work in mind when reading each sentence, a requirement that borders on the impossible. But, what does this mean, compared to the energy and spiritual power that the author had to use, when forging this dense work, to keep in mind at every moment of its conception and execution the innumerable relationships that are established between its elements, and tie them in a coherent set. Only considered from this point of view, Ulysses appears to us as a gigantic and literally incomparable work. ”

Ernst Robert Curtius

“Joyce is truly the great poet of a new phase of human consciousness. Like Proust's world, Whitehead's or Einstein's, Joyce's world always changes as it is perceived by different observers and even at different times. It is an organism composed of 'facts', which can be taken as infinitely complete or infinitely small; and each of these facts presupposes all the others and is at the same time unique.

edmund wilson

“Ulysses is the most difficult of entertaining novels, and the most entertaining of difficult novels. Reading it is not enough; you have to do it with special attention, and read it again.”

Richard Ellman

“Joyce picked up the art of writing where Flaubert left off. In Ulysses he developed a process begun in Bouvard and Pécuchet, and took it to an extreme degree of density and efficiency. [...] Where Cervantes satirized one form of madness and one bombastic mode of expression, Joyce satirized at least seventy, implicitly including a complete history of English prose.”

ezra pound

"One must approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."

William Faulkner

“It is indisputable that Joyce is one of the foremost writers of our time. Verbally, he is perhaps the first. In Ulysses there are sentences, there are paragraphs, which are not inferior to the most illustrious of Shakespeare..."

Jorge Luis Borges