Quotes About Balzac

I am in the middle of reading Balzac, César Birotteau. I will send it to you when I have finished it - I think I shall read the whole of Balzac again.

But there is edited every day in Paris, Balzac would tell us, a sort of spoken newspaper, more terrible than its printed rivals

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.

was Balzac, half in jest, who mused, 'What will become of the world when all women are like George Sand?

Androgyny was a subject of some interest in Balzac's time. The Girodet painting of Endymion for which the castrato Zambinella served, in Balzac's fiction, as a far-off model offers a visual androgyny. And perhaps androgyny is a metaphor for the artist who creates life from his sole self and body.

Balzac, very much like Freud in his most speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discovers that the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive.

Henry James in "The Lesson of Balzac" praised his precursor for giving his characters "the long rope," for acting themselves out. That grant of freedom to his created life was for James crucial to Balzac's success in representation of persons in the world. James saw Balzac's creation of character as ultimately motivated by love: "The love, as we call it, the joy in their communicated and exhibited

Everywhere in Balzac desire is an urge to find out, to know (Freud's epistemophilia), which is to say that the drive to know is itself sexualized.

As Baudelaire remarked, even Balzac's concierges have genius; everyone in his world is "stuffed with willpower from head to toe.

Balzac knew intuitively the need for invented persons to represent life for us, with an enhanced sense of the odds and stakes of life. Representation for Balzac always touched on the theatrical, offering life bathed in starker, more revealing light.

Balzac's semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.