1799–1850 · French novelist · author of La Comédie humaine
Balzac (born in Tours on 20 May 1799, died in Paris on 18 August 1850) built La Comédie humaine, a linked sequence of novels and stories that Wikipedia ↗ describes as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life. He is regarded as one of the founders of European literary realism, and his trick of letting the same characters reappear across books — Vautrin and Rastignac among them — is part of why his lines circulate detached from their speakers. The sentence people quote as his was never his; the sharper, narrower one he actually wrote is put in the mouth of a criminal who is trying to corrupt someone.