Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
— Gustave Flaubert
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Madame Bovary is myself.
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Exuberance is better than taste.
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
