Virginia Woolf Diary September 8, 1922

"Nature obligingly supplies me with the illusion that I am about to write something good: something rich, & deep, & fluent, & hard as nails, while bright as diamonds".

"I finished Ulysses, & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; nut of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; stratling; doing stunts...

I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face - as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy".