I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.
I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.
I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.
Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one.
When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
