Maupassant

From Maupassant's Pierre et Jean:

'What you have to do is look at what you wish to express long enough and with enough attention to discover an aspect of it that has never been seen or described by anyone before. There is something unexplored in everything, because we have grown used to letting our eyes be conditioned by the memory of what others have thought before us about whatever we are looking at.... To describe a blazing fire and a tree on a plain, we must stay put in front of that fire and that tree on a plain until for us they no longer resemble any other tree or any other fire. That is the way which you will become original.'