As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.

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

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

Madame Bovary is myself.

I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.