Quotes from 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.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

Talent is not rare. What's rare is the devotion and stamina to keep writing, and the ability to build on the successes that your work already displays.

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

Olga Broumas visiting Iowa, and after her talk I asked her a question I had wanted to ask someone for years: "How do you endure the long times when you cannot write?" She said in that room full of writers and readers, "Even when I cannot write, I know I am still a writer, just the way I know I am still sexual even if I have not had a lover for many months.

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.

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.

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

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.