Émile Zola

"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I dont care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation."

"It was the noisome fruit of ignorance and filth, ever recurring, the Black Death, the Great Plague, which stride like giant skeletons through past centuries, scything down the pale, sad people of the countryside."

"They all listened to him, with curiosity but with the blank indifference of practical people who in their hearts no longer feared his God of wrath and chastisement. ... The whole thing was a complete waste of time; there was much more point in keeping on the right side of the Government police, who were the people with the power."

"The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones."

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."

"If the earth was restful and good to those who loved it, the villagers contaminating it like vermin, those human insects battening on its flesh, were enough to disgrace it and blight any approach to it."

"Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going."

"This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies."

"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud!"

"One forges ones style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines."

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."