One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, wom... - Gustave Flaubert

"You don’t make art out of good intentions."

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

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."