Gustave Flaubert

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”

“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white...”

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”

“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”

“You don’t make art out of good intentions.”

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-b...”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.”

“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”

“Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides...”

“My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.”

“Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.”

“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”

“There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more”

“I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thou...”

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just did...”

“It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.”