Quotes About Flaubert

Il fait une clientèle d'enfer ; l'autorité le ménage et l'opinion publique le protège. Il vient de recevoir la croix d'honneur.

The reminiscences, far too numerous, on which he dwelt produced a disheartening effect on him; he went no further with the work, and his mental vacuity redoubled.

Ce que Flaubert avait fait pour les religions et les philosophies antiques dans la Tentation de Saint Antoine, il l'a de nouveau accompli pour tous les savoirs modernes.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Yates's determinism, like Flaubert's, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won't move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.

'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.

Even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She was like: 'Oh, I'm sitting at the breakfast table with Flaubert,' and would say, if she burned some food or was late arriving, 'Don't put this in your novel!'

Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn't been constrained by convention or habit.

I say novelist, not writer. The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work.

Before he was seventeen, Flaubert was reading Victor Hugo, Byron, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Montaigne, and early acquired the conviction that there was no such thing as indecency in true literature. For a while, the literature of the schoolmasters seemed to him not to be literature at all.

La emotividad en el arte, argüía Flaubert, es barata, de folletín. El arte debe ser frío y contenido para que sea el espectador, no el autor, quien brinde el sentimiento a la obra, y no a la inversa.

I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education—a

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing… This is my "theory", and I maintain it's sentimental - at all events it isn't Flaubert's. How can he fag himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?