“‘I’ve got as far as page thirty without coming across a single colour or a single word that makes a picture. He speaks of a woman and I don’t know whether her dress was red or blue. As far as I’m concerned, if there are no colours, it’s useless, I can see nothing.’ And feeling that the less he was taken in earnest, the more he must exaggerate, he repeated: ‘—absolutely nothing!’”

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