An admirable sentiment. I don't think the human mind (including mine) is capable of following it 100%, but I wish more people at least aspired to it, and fewer people saw it as a sign of weakness (which it is not, quite the opposite).
Appreciating the work of someone else with a large audience that largely does not overlap with your own is just respecting that divide all the more. Maybe you're both wrong and there's some third writer who everyone loves.
But you know, being a writer with 'only' and audience numbered in the tens or hundreds of millions is a lot better than I'll ever manage. The projects I number as successes have had less than half as many users as that, and that's still an accomplishment most of us never achieve. I haven't done the things I hoped when I was 25 but I have done enough.
I read The Dead and Portrait. But when it came to Ulysses it felt like I was aspiring to read it. Too much work and too little pleasure
No one ever quotes Joyce. They allude to him. Maybe they're just further along that aspirational trail.
1. Don't be afraid to skip parts or start from the middle and jump around
2. Don't worry too much about it all fitting together - each small part is enjoyable even if you're not following that larger structure.
Basically open a page at random and revel in it. It's potentially a lot of fun to read.
I'll hasten to add that I personally haven't followed this advice. I gave my copy away before hearing it.
Ulysses is a hard slog. That should be expected from someone who wrote one page per day. IIRC correctly Ulysses took 7 years, so Joyce apparently wasn't even writing every day. I read Sometimes a Great Notion soon after, and enjoyed Kesey's 3 months of effort more.
That doesn't necessarily speaks to the quality of one's work.
'I fear those big words, which make us unhappy.'
are two I've seen quoted.