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Quote#Books & Reading

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a…

Quote byVirginia Woolf · 1882–1941

Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Diary entry on James Joyce's Ulysses (16 August 1922), quoted in Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary (1953; 1965), p. 47.

English (original)

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?

— Virginia Woolf

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