Fyodor Dostoevsky. Diary of a writer (№ 423402)

The modern "writer-artist", who gives types and dissociates himself with some specialty in literature (well, to expose merchants, men, etc.), usually walks all his life with a pencil and a notebook, eavesdrops and writes down characteristic words; ends up picking up a few hundred numbers of characteristic words. Then the novel begins, and a little bit of a merchant or a cleric will speak to him, he begins to pick up his speech from the notebook according to the recorded. Readers laugh and praise, and, it would seem, true: literally from nature is recorded, but it turns out that it is worse than a lie, precisely because the merchant or soldiers in the novel speak in essences, that is, as never before, no merchant and no soldier speaks in kind. He, for example, in nature will say such and such, recorded by you from him phrase, from ten phrases to the eleventh. The eleventh word is characteristic and ugly, and ten words before that nothing, like all people. And in the typist-artist, he speaks in characteristics completely, according to the recorded, and it turns out to be untrue. The derived type speaks as if from a book. The audience praises, but you do not inflate an experienced old writer.