Gustave Flaubert Quotes

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

That's what I love more than anything, just creating.

You can only write your own vision.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

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.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

In movies, storytelling and every single art form, we're creating wonder. You're starting with a blank page and creating something that doesn't exist.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

There's a responsibility to the story, but there's also the sense of fun you have. When everybody else leaves, you get to continue to create. For me, there's no other way! I really like creating from the ground up.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I love to be creative.