"Greetings to the Syracuse James Joyce Club from Sandymount Strand Road. Long may ye bloom...I know you have plenty to read to-day, but here are three more lines. They appeared five years ago in a book called The Spirit Level: The Strand/The dotted line my father's ash-plant made/On Sandymount Strand/Is something else the tide won't wash away."

"Although Clongownians claim that James Joyce, in his "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," spoke of Clongowes, he was in fact merely a "bird of passage" at Clongowes and spent the majority of his years at Belvedere College. Though my sons, who went to Clongowes, will disagree, I choose to believe that his exquisite Latin and the cadence in his writing were learned in Great Denmark Street. Fr. Samuel Morris, a famous rector at Belvedere, once said, "Give me a boy until he's ten, and he's mine for life." James Joyce is the living proof of it. He never left Dublin or, indeed, Belvedere."

"When Joyce died in Zurich he had beside him at his bedside, Oliver Gogarty's recently published Life of St. Patrick and a Greek lexicon to translate Gogarty's Greek quotations. Joyce used Gogarty as a model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses and though they later quarreled, Gogarty once confided to me that the most beautiful book written in the English language was the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That he thought highly of his friend's writing was shown by the fact that the last book he was reading was Gogarty's: 'I Follow St. Patrick'".

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

"Congratulations on taking on the near-impossible - making accessible the author of the greatest book of the century to the Syracuse audience and each Bloomsday bringing a little more light to the Ulysses labyrinth. No punctuation needed. Yes!"

"Will be celebrating Bloomsday in Venice, a city Joyce disliked but my wife and I adore--can't agree with the Master on everything. After two weeks there, on to Trieste, where I will deliver a lecture, "Whorehouse/Playhouse", on the brothel as the setting for "Circe", and teach a week-long seminar on Dubliners, one of the three seminars offered at John McCourt and Renzo Crivelli's Trieste Summer School this July." ... And from last year: "If I were not going to be in Siracusa on June 16th, taking a commodius vicus via Sicily to the JJ Symposium in London, I would certainly join my neighbors in Syracuse to celebrate Bloomsday. All the best to the Syracuse members of the best club in the world".

"It is wonderful to know that your group is so actively promoting a love for the works of perhaps the greatest writer in the English language of the 20th Century. I highly commend you and your Committee for these marvellous endeavours. The idea of offering $1000 scholarships to school and college students is indeed inspired."

"I congratulate you on your healthy membership. It is also very much in the tradition of American Irish generosity that you are taking the practical step of offering a thousand pounds in scholarship to High School seniors and college students. I am also pleased to see the involvement here of the Jesuits to whom Joyce despite his agnosticism remained grateful to the end of his life for the good education they gave him."

"Please have a Guinness or two for us and cheer on Poldy and Molly as they enter yet another year of a relationship, if not completely 'conjugal', at least fraught with 'affirmations.'"

"Considering the amount of media attention that was given to Ulysses Chinese translation in the mid 1990's, and its popularity among the urban populations of intellectuals and students in China, one cannot help but presume that it is helping to free many creative and individual minds there." Xiao had written over fifty books when Mao Zedong requested him to translate great works written in English into Chinese, including 'Napoleon', while the ideology prevented such works being available to the masses. Further, he completed the definitive edition of 'The Annotated Poems of Mao Zedong' for the Chairman whose wave of terror against intellectuals had then paradoxically resulted in his own incarceration! During WWII he was a research student at King's College, Cambridge. His best friend for 18-years was E.M. Forster, while he met regularly with Bertrand Russell (for tea), Ernest Hemingway (for pints), Edgar Snow, George Orwell (as they worked alongside, Orwell then with the BBC in Paris) and H.G. Wells.

"By a curious coincidence I've just finished reading Finnegans Wake and was deeply impressed by it. It's a game, of course, a joke, of course, but it also is a beautiful love story and in its own final way profoundly Catholic".

"Congratulations on yet another Bloomsday event, immortalising the works of the Master...not that he needs it! More importantly, however, the Syracuse Joyce Club should award itself a hearty pat on the back for the excellent work in adding yeast to hopping young minds in order to produce good heads on stout shoulders. I think every scholarship is worth a thousand Bloomsdays!"

"I heard in a psych course that only one novel has been written about sleep, Finnegans Wake, and that it is the most difficult book in the English language. It took the month of July to get through it the first time. I was amused, puzzled, amazed. I am not a real scholar, being too lazy and perhaps not all that bright, but I get a kick out of imitating Joyce. I pick a subject known to my friends and write a piece in straight prose. Then I revise it into the dream language. I find the most fun is reading Finnegans Wake out loud. I hear all manner of messages that the eye misses. I also empty my house in short order."