Quotes By Author: Gustave Flaubert
“But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men. ”
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“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.”
“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 thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.”
“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
“My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.”
“I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room”
“He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides”
“I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world”
“How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.”
“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, 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’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-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.”