George Moore on James Joyce

August 3, 1916
Sir Edward Marsh

Now to answer your questions. The only book I've read of Joyce's is "The Dubliners"; a collection of short stories. Some of them are trivial and disagreeable, but all are written by a very clever man, and the book contains one story, the longest story in the book and the last story, which seemed to me to be perfection whilst I read it. I regretted that I was not the author of it.  But this story does not prove that Joyce will go writing, and will end by something like a masterpiece. A talent, musical, literary, or pictorial, is a pale fluttering thing that a breath will extinguish... Of the novel [Portrait of  the Artist as a Young Man]  I know nothing. Joyce left a disagreeable reputation behind him in Dublin, but he came back after some years a different man and everything I heard of him is to his credit.