Gustave Flaubert Writing Quotations

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Talent is long patience.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.

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.

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

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

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.