694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

I'd like to be in love like this description, wouldn't you?...they moved among the carriages, the crowds, the noise, oblivious of everything but themselves, hearing nothing, as if they had been walking together in the country on a bed of dead leaves.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

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

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.

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

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

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.