"I said to Joyce in a bar in Paris in 1924: 'Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library.'
'I wouldn't want to call you a liar,' Joyce said, his eyes as cloudy as the ghastly cocktail he had before him (absinthe with kummel in lieu of water), 'but I'd always thought Russell more likely to commit sodomy with a pig than a boy. Ach, the world is full of surprises.'
I liked Jim Joyce but not his demented experiments with language. He threw away the chance of becoming a great novelist in the great tradition of Stendhal. He was always trying to make literature a substitute for religion."

[so der Erzähler Kenneth Toomey, Schriftsteller, in A. Burgess' Earthly Powers (1980) Vintage Books: 2004, p. 70]