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
The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.
The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.
The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.
I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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.
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
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.
Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity
I maintain that ideas are events. It is more difficult to make them interesting, I know, but if you fail the style is at fault.
Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.
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.