Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading
culminated in the "Comédie Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some
scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but
he alone left any important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest
was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable aftertaste.

But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship
of any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am
a student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have
read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I
remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and
my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave
inquietude,--study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering
of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to
frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the
breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring
from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is
in me the generating force; without this what invention I have is thin
and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly,
as it did in the composition of my unfortunate "Roses of Midnight."

Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the
magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is
washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can
carry. Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is
gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into
jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the
diamond and the glow of the ruby.