Here are my politics: I love music and painting; a good book is an event for me; I’m going on forty-four. How much time do I have left? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Very well! I maintain that in thirty years ministers will be a bit shrewder, but just about as honest as they are today.

He did have influence as a literary critic. In a word in Bologna “crystallization” has not yet begun. [citation needed]
In his works Stendhal "plagiarized" reprised appropriated excerpts from Giuseppe Carpani Théophile Frédéric Winckler Sismondi and others.

Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma 1839). [citation needed].