James Joyce On Writing

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Gustave Flaubert (the mentor of Joyce, Chekhov, Proust, Kafka, etc) had given a similar advice many years before Joyce had produced his monumental masterpiece Ulysses: the writer must be like a God; present everywhere, visible nowhere. In the pursuit of satisfying ones political ego, many writers today have neglected Flaubert and Joyce and Chekhov advice on the requirement that a writer be objective when writing a fiction.