It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids … and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert! … Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

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.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.