“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.”
More from Flaubert on Writing
“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.”
“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”
“Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.”
“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
“There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more”
“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“Literature is language charged with meaning”
Nora Roberts
6 quotes“You can fix anything but a blank page.”