Gustave Flaubert Quotes

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I never failed at anything in fiction.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

You have to take some dramatic license just to make it entertaining sometimes.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

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

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.

Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. It is the quickest means of transportation to reach dimensions above or beyond the traps set by the so-called realists. It is a way to learn levitation and travel in liberated continents, to travel by moonlight as well as sunlight.

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It's not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it's sensational art... It's like touching skin.

A creative person has to believe in the unseen and the untouched.