Bonnie Friedman quotes:

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.

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.

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

How we learn is what we learn.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

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

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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?