" Valéry held up Cézanne as ‘the example of the dedicated life’. Alex Danchev, in his new biography1, calls him ‘the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age’. An example more powerful than that of the artist who throws it all up (Gauguin found the voluptuous consolations of Tahiti in work and play; Rimbaud made good money as an arms trader), or the artist who goes mad and/or kills himself. More powerful because continuing to live can require more heroism than suicide: the constant work, constant striving, the frequent destruction of unsatisfactory work, and the need, as Cézanne saw it, for an incorruptibility in the life, on which incorruptibility of the work depended. "

― Julian Barnes , Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art