Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

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.

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, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

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

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

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 thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

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’t fill him with the same enthusiasm