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   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
 

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.

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.