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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Balls
Lead
Playing
Book
Writing
Men
Knuckles
Like
Attached
Piano

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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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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 that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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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.
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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
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After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
Gustave Flaubert
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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