Gustave Flaubert

"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."

"An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense. How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed."

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

"By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream"

"Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?"

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

"But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men."

"You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word."

"It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them."

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

"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."

"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."

"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."

"Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?"

"In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up."

"One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table."

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

"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, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison."

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."

"You don’t make art out of good intentions."