This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

Love is a scandal of the personal sort.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.

It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.