Gustave Flaubert Quotes

If you have a book to write, write it. If you want to record an album, record it. No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you're worthy.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way. Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write.The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

The nude alone is well dressed

I'm all about freedom in art. I'm from Texas, so when someone tells you which way to ride your horse, you think 'I'll just go to a different ranch. You guys are riding it backwards anyway.

I'm the person who writes most of my movies so every role is exactly what I want to be doing.

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.

I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There's no gallery show or book or film. It's pointless. Which hopefully means something.

... the precedents for feminine self-expression run back through all the ages since the art of writing was invented. ... The era may witness the first female engineer, motor truck chauffeur, radio broadcaster, head of an aviation school, or federal prohibition officer, but it has not produced the first thinking, creative, and writing woman by any means.

Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can't cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers.

I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

It's really fun to be writing and producing your own sketches. You almost have more control.

I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

Jimmy [Dean] was the most talented and original actor I ever saw work. He was also a guerrilla artist who attacked all restrictions on his sensibility. Once he pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I imitated his style in art and in life. It got me in a lot of trouble.

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.