694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind...

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Talent is long patience.

Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe" tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.