Balzac Quotes

• I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

  Friedrich Engels

  Together, I Have Learned, Economist

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• My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

  Umberto Eco

  Book, Home, School

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• Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

  W. H. Auden

  Country, Novelists, Roles

  "Forewords and Afterwords" by W. H. Auden, ("A Poet of the Actual"), (p. 266), 1973.

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• All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Political, Luck

  "Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba". Esquire, December 1934.

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• Balzac, you know, our great Balzac, he wrote interesting things about how in literature you keep distance in order to express great feelings. You have to keep a distance - and it's exactly the same with acting.

  Isabelle Huppert

  Distance, Order, Interesting

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• Translators who choose to work on canonized writers can usually lean on an extensive critical apparatus around either the author or the book in question, especially in the case of writers like [Honore] Balzac and [Emil] Zola.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Book, Zola, Cases

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The only street I like is Rue Honore de Balzac, because 'Balzac' sound so gay, and I love my gays. I might like Parisians more if they named their streets only for gay icons, like Rue Liza Minnelli or Rue Bette Midler or, my favorite, Rue McClanahan.

  Joan Rivers

  Gay, Icons, Sound

  Joan Rivers (2012). “I Hate Everyone...Starting with Me”, p.100, Penguin

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• My film is actually very critical of the level of French we're using back home. To have an immigrant from an ancient French colony come and do that is a little critical of our education system back home. Balzac is definitely over their heads. It's meant to be funny also because it would be also probably too much for kids in France, but kids in France would know who Balzac is. But, back home at that age, I guarantee you they don't know who he is.

  Philippe Falardeau

  Kids, Home, Age

  Source: collider.com

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• Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.

  Gore Vidal

  Communication, Years, Novel

  "The End of Gore Vidal". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2012.

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• Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton

  Light, Office, Novelists

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1873). “Thoughts about Art”, p.1

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• It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.

  Willa Cather

  Mad, Twenties, Littles

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.24, U of Nebraska Press

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• The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

  William Faulkner

  Art, Creativity, Years

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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• Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Kings, Sound, Different

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• I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

  Maya Angelou

  Writing, Black And White, Thinking

  "No surrender" by Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. May 24, 2002.

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