The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following...

The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.

Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the...

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

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.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations...

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

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.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.

One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures....

Equality is slavery. That is why I love art.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft

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.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one’s share of the common cake,...

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright…Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a...

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was...

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Doesn’t it seem to you,” asked Madame Bovary, “that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of...

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.