It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.

Madame Bovary is myself.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.

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