Flaubert Writing Quotes & Sayings

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. — Gustave Flaubert

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it. — Gustave Flaubert

First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these things in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. — Ernest Hemingway,

He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him. — Gustave Flaubert

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

Order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair - hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box, broke when it was opened. Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love, others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered nothing at all. — Gustave Flaubert

I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it ... I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop. — Gustave Flaubert

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. — Gustave Flaubert

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up. — Gustave Flaubert

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

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more. — Robert Stone

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. — Gustave Flaubert

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

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. — Gustave Flaubert

Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case, pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book, and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris. — Gustave Flaubert

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

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. — Gustave Flaubert

The public wants work which flatters its illusions. — Gustave Flaubert

Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living. — Gustave Flaubert

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed. — Gustave Flaubert

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word. — Dorothy Parker

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn't that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire? — Gustave Flaubert

Talent is long patience. — Gustave Flaubert

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm — Gustave Flaubert

It is a delightful thing to write, to cease to be oneself, to flow through the whole creation of which one speaks. Today, for example, man and woman at the same time, lover and mistress at once, I rode horseback through a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words they said to each other and the red sun that beat down on their eyelids, heavy with love, and made them droop. Is this pride or piety? Is it the inane outpouring of egotism, or a vague and noble religious instinct? When I think it over, after experiencing these delights, I would be tempted to offer a prayer of gratitude to God, if I were sure he could hear me. — Gustave Flaubert

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them. — Gustave Flaubert

I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that. — Julian Barnes

You don't make art out of good intentions. — Gustave Flaubert

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

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

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room — Gustave Flaubert

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. — Gustave Flaubert

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say the
way God sees events from above? — Gustave Flaubert

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing. — Gustave Flaubert

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

John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson. — Jonathan Dee

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. — Gustave Flaubert

Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer. — Gustave Flaubert

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. — Gustave Flaubert

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn't be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead — Gustave Flaubert

A good day - a bad day - so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am. Only Flaubert I think. Yet I see it now, as a whole. I think I can bring it off, if I only have courage and patience: take each scene quietly: compose: I think it may be a good book. And then - oh when it's finished! — Virginia Woolf

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. — Gustave Flaubert

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. — Gustave Flaubert

The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing? — Virginia Woolf