Gustave Flaubert

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn__ that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

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

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.

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

Books aren__ made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There__ some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it__ back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Read in order to live.

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn__ be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

You don__ make art out of good intentions.

Writing is a dog__ life, but the only one worth living.

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

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

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.

This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.

His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.

But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.