Authors:
  • One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

    Statement on February 08, 1868. "Pages from the Goncourt Journal". Book by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Robert Baldick, p. 135, 1962.