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"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
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"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."
"A book is as private and consensual as sex."
"And all who told it added something new And all who heard it made enlargements too."
"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."
"I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert
"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."
"Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness."
"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?"
"But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart."
"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."
"Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her-the opportunity, the courage."
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