Excerpt from The Network episode 4   (from Zoe's narrative)

“I didn’t even try to read Flaubert in French. I just piled in and I’m sure I missed a lot and yet… I don’t think Flaubert ever wants you to stop and say ‘wasn’t that a great piece of writing?’”

“That’s what great style is about, don’t you think? Not noticing the author at all. And yet some great authors make themselves noticed, like Tolstoy or Dickens.”

“I always got fed up when Dickens starts talking. I sometimes thought he must have been having trouble making up that episode and chucked in a thousand words from himself.”

“Don’t be too hard on him, Steve. He had a public to satisfy. Suppose he’d written like Flaubert, one sentence a day.”

“That really got to me, that one sentence a day. And often going back on it and correcting it. Caring that much about characters you don’t even like. God, if I had written Madame Bovary it would be over in about five minutes. Stuck-up cow reads too many fantasy novels, marries this dim doctor, lives out in the sticks, and then she moves but it’s still in the sticks and then… and then…” And all at once my beloved was asleep with his arm around me. Good old Flaubert!!