Quote

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
Playing
Book
Writing
Men
Knuckles
Like
Attached
Piano
Balls
Lead

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Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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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.
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
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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.
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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
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