'The Decay of Lying', part 2

Even Wilde isn't above quoting others:

__ "All Balzac's characters," said Baudelaire, "are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will."
__ Goethe says, somewhere --  In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
"It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,"  and the limitation, the very condition of any art is style.

There's plenty here to remind us of Orhan Pamuk's "My Name Is Red".

• The whole history of these arts in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own imitative spirit.
• To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.
• No great artist ever sees things as they really are.
• A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
  

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