Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
There is no truth. There is only perception.
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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.
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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.
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Read in order to live.
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
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.
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Madame Bovary is myself.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
Exuberance is better than taste.
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
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 seeing things.
Read much, but not many books.
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
