Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
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!
I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.
Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.
God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!
The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.
I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.
But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature."