“Edouard dozes; insensibly his thoughts take another direction. He wonders whether he would have guessed merely by reading Laura’s letter that her hair was black. He says to himself that novelists, by a too exact description of their characters, hinder the reader’s imagination rather than help it, and that they ought to allow each individual to picture their personages to himself according to his own fancy. He thinks of the novel which he is planning and which is to be like nothing else he has ever written. He is not sure that The Counterfeiters is a good title. He was wrong to have announced it beforehand.”

—André Gide, The Counterfeiters, translated by Dorothy Bussy, 1927.