Bonnie Friedman Quotes

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.

— Bonnie Friedman

“Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“We should be told: Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until you're not thinking in words anymore, but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Right what you care about. Don't write one more word you don't care about. Don't waste any more of your life on what does not matter to you. Write only what matters to you-those scenes, those dialogues. Get messy. Before you get neat, get very, very messy. Write until you are more alive than you have ever been before.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Stories hang from the trees, hive under the coffee table, gather like glass on the corners of the road. To pick them up one needs simply to focus one's eye and keep a steady hand. Writing focuses the eye; writing develops the steadiness of one's hand.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear.”

— Bonnie Friedman

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

— Bonnie Friedman

“How we learn is what we learn.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world ...”

— Bonnie Friedman

“The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through ... That is why people read: to have experiences.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“What is this thing that has us chewing at our own selves, grating ourselves against our own sharp sieve? It is the act of stepping back. It is the act of separating, and judging. It takes only one because the one becomes two.”

— Bonnie Friedman

“I spent the morning smashing fliesI killed one fly against the doorjamb. Another I stalked into the kitchen ... A third fly wavered by the kitchen window. When I swatted, a wild ferocious swing, a whole trembling crowd shot from the window like pebbles from a blunderbuss, then settled back. My heart pounded. I felt flushed with disgust and irritation. Why must I always have such obstacles to my writing?”

— Bonnie Friedman

“We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?”

— Bonnie Friedman