There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

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

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.