A woman can only become a man's friend after having first been his acquaintance and then his beloved — then she becomes his friend. - Anton Chekhov

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know — which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.

I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.