It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Madame Bovary is myself.

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.