top of page
.png){kind=small}
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Authorship quotes
"We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are."
"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."
"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
"The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more."
Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert
"Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men."
"Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can't stiffen up enough to create them."
"On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters."
"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."
"One thinks of nothing,' he continued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
"I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity."
"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
bottom of page