Quotes About Writing

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

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

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

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.

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

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

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

But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows.

Happy are they whose pens fly across the page; I myself hesitate, I falter. I become angry and fearful. My drive diminishes as my taste improves. I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well proportioned paragraph.

My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world.

It's no easy business to be simple.

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

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes." ? 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 a rich field of ideas and similes we could tap! Books that have been the source of entire literatures, like Homer and Rabelais, contain the sum of all the knowledge of their times. They knew everything, those fellows, and we know nothing.

You must write for yourself, above all.

El autor debe estar en su libro como Dios en su universo, presente en todas partes, pero siempre invisible.

Gustave Flaubert

it is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

L'art d'écrire est l'art de découvrir ce en quoi vous croyez.

I feel that I am not saying what I want to say, I haven't found the proper outlet for my thoughts.

Közden ellerim ile, ateÅŸin tabiat? hakk?nda yaz?yorum.

je ne serai jamais qu'un écrivailleur honni, un vaniteux misérable. // l shall never be anything but a despised scribbler, a poor conceited fool.

Flaubert complains in a letter to Colet, "What a bitch of a thing prose is! It's never finished; there's always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.