You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [Zola was his youth friend, who used Cezanne as a model in his novel 'L'Oeuvre'] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one.

In: a conversation in Cezanne's studio in Aix - after the death of Zola in 1902, as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74 - after 1900