"I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches..." — Gustave Flaubert

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

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

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.