Gustave Flaubert

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don__ get horny enough to actually to father them.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?

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 didn__ fill him with the same enthusiasm

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

I__ dazzled by your facility. In ten days you__l have written six stories! I don__ understand it_ I__ like one of those old aqueducts: there__ so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

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

Come, let__ be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.