Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubertwas an influential French novelist who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary, for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 December 1821
CityRouen, France
CountryFrance
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.
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.