It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTIt’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTYou must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTAfter a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTAll you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOne’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTWhat wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTExuberance is better than taste.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOne can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTStupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTEverything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTWhat an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOf all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTDo not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT