Novelists From France

"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."

"One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."

"Art is science made clear."

"What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."

"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."

"The joy of youth is to disobey, but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders."

"Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images."

"The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches."

"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head."

"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."

"He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world."

"Don’t for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels."

"I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead."

"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."

"That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier’s wrist."

"Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs."

"You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."

"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee."

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

"Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for."

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."

"What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end."

"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?"

"The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed."

"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."

"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."

"After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."

"What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies."

"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."

"Depuis le jour de ma naissance, ma mort s'est mise en marche. Elle marche à ma rencontre, sans se presser."

"Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity."

"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."

"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."

"Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."

"The Louvre is like the morgue; one goes there to identify one’s friends."

"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."

"Un enfant, monsieur, n'est-il pas l'image de deux êtres, le fruit de deux sentiments librement confondus ?"

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"You are not, with Balzac, in the Elysian fields; you are sometimes much rather in the Halls of Eblis. But, if you can only apprehend it, there is always Imagination to guide, relieve, console you; and it is the Imagination of a Titan, if not exactly of a God."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"Stendhal's a good novelist, but I think the limitations of Stendhal have been rather disastrous. I think you'd do better with Balzac. If you have to imitate a Frenchman."

"Balzac said 200 years ago that "behind every great fortune lies a crime," but we know how to create wealth now: the Industrial Revolution created wealth, the and our ability to manipulate cyberspace, and to develop concepts and structures in mathematics, and elsewhere. We can create real wealth. So, per se, being wealthy is now not the result of taking from those with less; and yet this historic problem has come roaring back... under the guise of conservatism."

"Quantity and intensity are at once and together his sign."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society. The proof of that is the importance given to Balzac's Human Comedy by critics in the Eastern European countries, critics who stem from the extreme left. Balzac himself was an extremely conservative person politically, very reactionary, but in his Comédie Humaine he gave such a truthful, marvellous picture of that very society of which he was a part, that in the eyes of the leftist critics, socialist critics, he gives an unbeatable picture of what was wrong with the bourgeoisie at that time, of the seeds of its own destruction that were within it. A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed."

"Balzac, perhaps the most wonderful writer of fiction the world has ever seen, has in many of his novels overstepped this limit. He drags us by his magic force through scene after scene of unmitigated vice, till the effect of walking among this human carrion is a moral nausea."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"Balzac's reaction was somewhat different, but in its own way no less flattering. The novelist had become a good friend of both Aurore's and Jules Sandeau's, and they had been amused to see him use the money earned by his La Peau de Chagrin to transform his low-ceilinged apartment on the Rue Cassini into an "assemblage of marquises' boudoirs" — as George Sand later described it — with walls dripping in a feminine exuberance of silk and lace. Once, after entertaining them to a dinner of boiled beef, melons, and champagne (his standard fare), he had insisted on accompanying them home as far as the arrayed in a lovely new dressing gown and with a handsome brass candlestick to light the way, explaining as they went that no robber would dream of attacking him — taking him either for a dangerous madman or a prince whom it would be wiser to respect."

"I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. I'm sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn't experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me what I could not get in America, which was a sense of "If I can do it, I may do it." I won't generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do that. I'd already been defined."