Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the ...

Flaubert's Parrot

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvement...

Flaubert's Parrot

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like me...

Flaubert's Parrot

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

Flaubert's Parrot

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Flaubert's Parrot

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Flaubert's Parrot

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sen...

Flaubert's Parrot

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

Flaubert's Parrot

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Flaubert's Parrot

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

Flaubert's Parrot

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Flaubert's Parrot

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to ...

Flaubert's Parrot

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Flaubert's Parrot

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Flaubert's Parrot

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in som...

Flaubert's Parrot

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Flaubert's Parrot

Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the righ...

Flaubert's Parrot

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those...

Flaubert's Parrot