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The royal couple seem to be not only physically present before Velázquez, but to stand on this side of the painting with us, the viewers. And where, we might ask, stands the artist, if he is studying his own visage too in reflection? The towering, unseen canvas at left, its ragged border edged with palpable strokes of paint, draws us further into his elaborate visual conundrum. It may hold a life-size portrait of the Infanta, or perhaps "Las Meninas" itself—an ingenious conceit that would make the real painting a metaphoric mirror of its own creation—or, more likely, depict the king and queen who have assumed a formal portrait stance beneath a florid red drapery. Yet if they are posing in the studio, why is their presence only beginning to be acknowledged? The arrested glance of the Infanta (Picasso would find it tantalizing), whose head turns left even as she, like the chamberlain, looks back, suggests that they have just arrived. That realization seems to have a ripple-like effect on her companions across the room. Their captured, candid postures and growing awareness of Philip and Marianna stand in marked contrast to the monarchs' static stares, or to the searching scrutiny of the painter. No mere, teasing narrative, "Las Meninas" encapsulates in magnificent form the power, and art, of painting itself.

      As you know, Jacques Chirac is not permitted to meet with his former prime minister, Dominique du Villepin. Judges have forbidden him to do so.    
 

Nevertheless, as a weekly newspaper revealed, on Sept. 21, the opening day of the Clearstream trial, the two men met in the street.
 

“We hugged,” said Dominique de Villepin, but didn’t speak. One can believe it was by chance or not. What is certain is that Jacques Chirac constantly learned news of Villepin from his friends. Quite often he would ask them: “How is Dominique?” Moreover, he affirmed this morning in an interview with Le Figaro that he still holds Villepin in his esteem and affection...

As for Nicolas Sarkozy’s attitude concerning the former president, it’s considerably less aggressive than that which he has adopted toward Villepin. During the trial, those close to the president felt free to say that that he shouldn’t “pester” Chirac anymore at his age, retired from politics.
 

For 30 years, Chirac and Sarkozy have fostered a complex relationship, which has evolved. Each knows perfectly well what to expect from the other, and they know each other better than anyone. For her part, Bernadette Chirac, without illusions about the customs of politics, has always made sure to stay in contact with Sarkozy, even when the latter showed himself to be her husband’s most aggressive rival.
  

   First, permit me to make a somewhat risky comparison: all works of art are like a window opened upon creation: inside the window there's a kind of transparent screen, across which one can see objects that are more or less deformed, undergoing changes that are more or less perceptible in their lines and colors. These changes are derived from the nature of the screen. Creation is no longer exact or real, but modified by the medium through which its image passes.  

 

 

Emile Zola in a letter to Anthony Valabrègue, 1864

 

Follow my example: break with the outside world, live like a bear—a polar bear—send everything to the devil, everything and yourself with it, except your own intelligence.
 

Flaubert's advice to Alfred Le Poittevin on becoming a writer
 

It came so naturally to Jane Austen to describe people by means of their faults that had there been a drop of bitterness in her spirit her novels would have given us the most consistently satirical picture of life that exists. Open them where you will, you are almost certain to light upon some passage exquisitely satirising the absurdities of life—satirising them, but without bitterness, partly no doubt because she was happy in her life, partly because she had no wish that things should be other than they are. People could never be too absurd, life never too full of humours and singularities for her taste, and as for telling people how they ought to live, which is the satiric motive, she would have held up her hands in amazement at the thought. Life itself—that was the object of her love, of her absorbed study; that was the pursuit which filled those unrecorded years and drew out the "quiet intensity of her nature," making her appear to the outer world a little critical and aloof, and "at times very grave." More than any other novelist she fills every inch of her canvas with observation, fashions every sentence into meaning, stuffs up every chink and cranny of the fabric until each novel is a little living world, from which you cannot break off a scene or even a sentence without bleeding it of some of its life. Her characters are so rounded and substantial that they have the power to move out of the scenes in which she placed them into other moods and circumstances [...]

Only those who have realized for themselves the ridiculous inadequacy of a straight stick dipped in ink when brought into contact with the rich and tumultuous glow of life can appreciate to the full the wonder of her achievement, the imagination, the penetration, the insight, the courage, the sincerity which are required to bring before us one of those perfectly normal and simple incidents of human life.

The thirteen volumes of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu are the result of an unconstruable synthesis in which the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of a monomaniac have combined in an autobiographical work.
 

Walter Benjamin, "The Image of Proust"

The formation of words into comprehensible phrases was my way to  be private, publicly—to be a controlled exhibitionist...

- Toni Bentley, former ballet dancer for George Balanchine, on why she gave up dancing in order to write.

In painting, this is obvious. One landscape by Claude Monet does not equal another landscape by the same Monet. Even if painted in the same year, the subject will differ. And even if painted in the same place, the light, the composition, the density of the color scheme will vary. The prices that Monets will fetch may be $2 million or $20 million, or more, depending on a host of factors, like size, period, subject, color. To understand the reasons for each specific price, prospective buyers must have an eye trained to evaluate the quality of the composition, the vibrancy of the tonalities. And even if they enjoy that ability, this is still not enough.

The price of a painting also depends on condition. That again may make any given work twice as expensive as expected if perfect, or unsalable if not too good. [...]

Much hinges on perception, a human factor as variable and unpredictable as the weather. At any given point, there is rarely total agreement about the characterization of a picture among the finest connoisseurs, even if the authorship is beyond dispute. One may deem it admirably composed and another not really vigorous enough.

 

What makes us happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, sheer agony.

His continual visits to these two houses made, as it were, two kinds of music in his life: one wild and playful and amusing, the other solemn and almost religious; and as they were both vibrating in unison, they expanded and gradually blended, so that if Madame Arnoux so much as brushed him with her finger, immediately his desire would conjure up the other woman, if only because his chances of success in that direction were less remote; in Rosanette's company, if something happened to touch his heart, he at once remembered his True Love.