One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

Read in order to live.

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.