You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.