228:« The public wants love and only love, and writers are forced to sell it. They dispense it in boxes, bags, decanters, and bottles. If literature has remained behind the sciences in the ascent toward the conquest of ideas, it is because it is hungrier for immediate success and for money. Literature has been more inclined to embody the routines, vices, and ignorance of a public that wishes to be lulled and duped with stories of another world. » (July 25, 1890).
234:« Today action must take refuge in books. Only in books – disengaged from the multiple and sickly contingencies that stifle and destroy it – does action find the proper terrain in which to cultivate the ideas it sows. Ideas remain and multiply. Once sowed, they germinate. After germinating, they flower. And humanity comes to pick these flowers, making bouquets of joy for its future deliverance. » (March 11, 1895).
105:, between 1876 and 1916, on literature, journalism, and publishing over the course of his long career as an influential journalist. Although Mirbeau collaborated with numerous daily newspapers, he was never officially assigned the work of literary reviewer. Of these articles, some 60 were published between 1925 and 1926 under the title
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Literature, for
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However, Mirbeau was well aware that, in a conformist bourgeois society, and under a capitalist economy whose sole object was profit, journalism and publishing were becoming increasingly contaminated, serving only as an instrument for besotting the masses. Good literature, Mirbeau believed, was
231:« There is no need, I believe, to understand everything in art. There are dark, harmonious, and sonorous things that envelop you in a mystery that it is wrong to illumine. Since we do not understand life, why wish to understand everything in what paraphrases it? » (January 1893).
222:« In art, exactness means deformation, and truth means falsehood. In literature, there is nothing that is absolutely true, or, rather, there exist as many human truths as there are individuals. » (Nov. 3, 1884).
225:« It is no longer a matter of creating a beautiful work; instead, it is necessary to know how to organize a beautiful publicity campaign. » (May 11, 1889)
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284:« Léon Bloy »
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190:Léon Werth
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443:Novels
188:, and
90:France
64:essays
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