One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

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

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.