He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up - execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.

I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.