He knows nothing of love; passion to him is a childish illness like measles--poor unhappy spirit!" "You might be describing Mrs.Humphry Ward," I cried.
"God forbid, Frank," he exclaimed with such mock horror I had to laugh.
"After all, Hardy is a writer and a great landscape painter." "I don't know why it is," he went on, "but I am always match-making when I think of English celebrities.

I should so much like to have introduced Mrs.Humphry Ward blushing at eighteen or twenty to Swinburne, who would of course have bitten her neck in a furious kiss, and she would have run away and exposed him in court, or else have suffered agonies of mingled delight and shame in silence.
"And if one could only marry Thomas Hardy to Victoria Cross he might have gained some inkling of real passion with which to animate his little keepsake pictures of starched ladies.

A great many writers, I think, might be saved in this way, but there would still be left the Corellis and Hall Caines that one could do nothing with except bind them back to back, which would not even tantalise them, and throw them into the river, a new _noyade_: the Thames at Barking, I think, would be about the place for them...." "Where do you go every afternoon ?" I asked him once casually.
"I go to Cannes, Frank, and sit in a cafe and look across the sea to Capri, where Tiberius used to sit like a spider watching, and I think of myself as an exile, the victim of one of his inscrutable suspicions, or else I am in Rome looking at the people dancing naked, but with gilded lips, through the streets at the _Floralia_.

I sup with the _arbiter elegantiarum_ and come back to La Napoule, Frank," and he pulled his jowl, "to the simple life and the charm of restful friendship." More and more clearly I saw that the effort, the hard work, of writing was altogether beyond him: he was now one of those men of genius, talkers merely, half artists, half dreamers, whom Balzac describes contemptuously as wasting their lives, "talking to hear themselves talk"; capable indeed of fine conceptions and of occasional fine phrases, but incapable of the punishing toil of execution; charming companions, fated in the long run to fall to misery and destitution.
Constant creation is the first condition of art as it is the first condition of life.
I asked him one day if he remembered the terrible passage about those "eunuchs of art" in "La Cousine Bette." "Yes, Frank," he replied; "but Balzac was probably envious of the artist-talker; at any rate, we who talk should not be condemned by those to whom we dedicate our talents.

It is for posterity to blame us; but after all I have written a good deal.