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
Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint .... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
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.
Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
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.
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.