“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
More from Flaubert on Writing
“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.”
“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.”
“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“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”