Writing Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

— Gustave Flaubert

Talent is long patience.

— Gustave Flaubert

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

— Gustave Flaubert

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

“The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

— Gustave Flaubert

“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop…

— Gustave Flaubert

“It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an…

— Gustave Flaubert

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce…

— Gustave Flaubert

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— 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…

— 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’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…

— Gustave Flaubert

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he…

— Gustave Flaubert

“One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren’t lacking in stamina, what…

— Gustave Flaubert

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by…

— Gustave Flaubert

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external,…

— Gustave Flaubert

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement,…

— Gustave Flaubert

“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write…

— Gustave Flaubert

“To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains…

— Gustave Flaubert

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own…

— Gustave Flaubert

“It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque,…

— Gustave Flaubert

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…

— Gustave Flaubert

“It is a delightful thing to write, to cease to be oneself, to flow through the whole creation of which one speaks.…

— Gustave Flaubert

“Amongst those who go to sea there are the navigators who discover new worlds, adding continents to the earth and stars to…

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

“With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire.”

— Gustave Flaubert

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert