Gustave Flaubert was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.

1. The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
2. Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
3. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
4. There is no truth. There is only perception.
5. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
6. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
7. Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
8. Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
9. Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.
10. Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
11. One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
12. One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
13. You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
14. One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
15. The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

1.  Alice Kahn: The best writing advice I’ve ever heard: Don’t write like you went to college.
2. Andrei Codrescu: Best advice I ever got was from the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, who told me in Bucharest, before I emigrated: ‘Learn English. French is dead.’
3. Christopher Buckley: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from William Zinsser: ‘Be grateful for every word you can cut.’
4. Cynthia Ozick: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Write with authority.
5. David Guterson: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.
6. George Plimpton: I think the best advice on writing I’ve received was from John Steinbeck, who suggested that one way to get around writer’s block (which I was suffering hideously at the time) was to pretend to be writing to an aunt, or a girlfriend. I did this, writing to an actress friend I knew, Jean Seberg. The editors of Harpers forgot to take off the salutation and that’s how the article begins in the magazine: Dear Jean….
7. James Atlas: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from Dwight Macdonald: ‘Everything about the same subject in the same place.’
8. Margaret Carlson: Best writing advice I’ve ever received: Sell everything three times.
9. Nick Tosches: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was given to me, like so much else, by Hubert Selby, Jr.: to learn and to know that writing is not an act of the self, except perhaps as exorcism; that, in writing what is worth being written, one serves, as vessel and voice, a power greater than vessel and voice.
10. Patsy Garlan: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Don’t answer the phone.
11. Peter Mayle: Best advice on writing I’ve ever received: Finish.
12. Richard Ford: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received: ‘Don’t have children.’ I gave it to myself.
13. Robert Lipsyte: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, ‘Rewrite it!’ A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting—making the story better, clearer, truer.
14. Russell Banks: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was probably something Ted Solotaroff told me years ago when he was my editor. Going over a manuscript line by line again and again he kept reminding me, ‘Remember, this is your book, not my book. You’re the one who’s going to have to live with it the rest of your life. I might publish 30 or 40 books this year, you’re only going to publish one, and probably the only one you’re going to publish in two or three years.’
15. Whitney Balliett: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is, ‘Knock ‘em dead with that lead sentence.’