"As if I already had some inkling of my own future fate, I was most moved by those of the people here who had no homeland, or even worse, had not just one but two or three, and privately still did not feel sure where they belonged. There was one young man with a small brown beard, whose keen, dark eyes were hidden behind glasses with noticeably thick lenses, and who usually sat alone in a corner of the Cafe Odeon. I was told that he was a very talented English writer. When I was introduced to James Joyce a few days later, he firmly denied any connection with England. He was Irish, he said. He did write in the English language, but his thinking was not English, nor did he want it to be. "I would like," he told me, "a language above other languages, a language serving them all. I can't express myself entirely in English without making myself a part of a certain tradition." I didn't quite understand this. I did not know that he was already writing Ulysses at the time. He had lent me his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the only copy he possessed, and his little play Exiles. I thought at the time that I would like to help him by translating it. The better I came to know him, the more his fantastic knowledge of languages amazed me. All the words of every idiom seemed to be stored behind that curving almost chiselled brow, which shone as smoothly as porcelain in electric light, and he played in those words brilliantly. One day, when he asked me how I would render a difficult sentence from the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in German, we tried to work it out together in both German and Italian. He had four or five alternatives in each language for every word, including some dialect words, and understood every nuance of their meaning and weight. There was always a certain bitterness about him, but I think this irritability was in fact what gave him the strength to be so vigorous and creative. His resentment of Dublin, England, and certain people had taken the form of dynamic energy that was set free only in his writing. However, he appeared to be happy enough with his own dour disposition; I never saw him laugh, or look really cheerful. He always seemed like some dark concentrated force, and when I met him in the street, with his narrow lips pressed firmly together, always walking fast and as if towards some particular destination, I sensed the defensive isolation of his nature even more strongly than in conversation. I was not at all surprised when, later, he wrote that extremely original book [Ulysses], entirely of its own kind. It fell into our times like a meteor."
-- Stefan Zweig on meeting James Joyce (from his autobiography, The World of Yesterday)