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
[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
Equality is slavery. That is why I love art.
Print: to see one's name in print! - Some people commit a crime for no other reason
Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they're just as useless! And they stay in the desert! Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.
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.
The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.
The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.