Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

I was bookish and awkward and wanted a means of expressing the millions of emotions flying around inside me. The piano seemed as good an outlet as any.

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

When I am not writing, I'm dying.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

I close my eyes. And i scream. If my whole world is crashing down around me, then I am going to make the sound of the crashing. I want to scream until all my bones break.

I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

I will not go on, I thought. I won't. I will throw my soul to the wind and blow into a thousand pieces. I will wash up on a shore somewhere like bleached and broken driftwood. I will dry out in the sun until I-and any gift I ever had-shrivel into the sand.

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.

My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.