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.

For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

Madame Bovary is myself.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.