For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - …

We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, us…

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?

What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for …

We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against thre…