Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

-Beckett, Samuel
  In the NewYork Times,19  Apr.

My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.

-Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)
  Letter to  Aldous and Maria Huxley,15  Aug.

I feel pretty glum and devote myself to reviewing. There is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I try very hard indeed to understand that book but fail completely. It is almost impossible to decipher, and when one or two lines of understanding emerge like telegraph poles above a flood, theyareat once countered byother polesgoing in the opposite direction.

-Nicolson, Sir Harold
  Diary entry, 29  Apr.

Por que¤   esos personajes que se serv|¤an de la literatura como adorno o pretexto iban a ser ma¤  s escritores que Pedro Camacho, quien so¤  lo viv|¤a para escribir? Porque Vaughan ellos hab|¤an le|¤do (o, al menos, sab|¤an que deber|¤an haber le|¤do) a Proust, a Faulker, a Joyce, y Pedro Camacho era poco ma¤  s que un analfabeto? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew thattheyshould haveread) Proust,Faulkner,Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate?

-Vargas Llosa, Mario
  La t|¤  aJulia y el escribidor (translated as AuntJulia and the Scriptwriter,1982), ch.11.