When a young man came up to him in Zurich and said, 'May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?' Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, 'No, it did lots of other things too.'

Richard Ellmann James Joyce (1959); referring to William Shakespeare (1564–1616) King Lear (1605–6): 'gloucester: O! let me kiss that hand! lear: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.'