"So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!"

Literature, Critique, Observation, Society

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"So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!"

Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert

"Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal."

Man, Woman

"Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom."

Faith, Art, Freedom, Nothing

"Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others."

Travel, Traveling

"A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies."

Friendship, Friend

"The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it."

Art, Pride

"I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key."

Being, Key, Language

"Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry."

Poetry, Geometry

"Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution."

Happiness, Age, Constitution, Ruin

"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."

Work, God, Artist, Creation

"The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family."

Family,

Exlpore more Literature quotes

"Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever."

Ursula K. Le Guin, American Writer

Literature, Fiction, Understanding, Experience, People

"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Literature, Books, Culture, Inspirational, Imagination

"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."

Gilbert K. Chesterton, English Writer

Literature, Desire, Nostalgia, Memory

"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Literature, Sensuality, Beauty, Fiction

"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."

Jane Austen, British Writer

Literature, Reading, Books, Judgment, Quality

"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."

George R. R. Martin, American Author

Literature, Legacy, Writing, Art

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

Jane Austen, British Writer

Literature, Novel, Writing, Talent, Humanity

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

George Orwell, British Author

Literature, Writing, Prose, Creativity, Art

"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."

Stephen King, American Author

Literature, Reading, Truth, Wisdom, Power

"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"

Maya Angelou, American Poet

Literature, Reading, Memory, Brother, Poetry