Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

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...

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.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.

Success is a result, not a goal

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...

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

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like...

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to...

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex…

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)

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.

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Non leggete, come fanno i bambini, per divertirvi, o, come fanno gli ambiziosi per istruirvi. No, leggete per vivere.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

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...

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless

A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.

To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success – a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances

The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave...

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking,...

No, read in order to live.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

There is no truth. There is only perception.

What is beautiful is moral; that is all there is to it.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.