Bonnie Friedman Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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

Bonnie Friedman
Our sword in the stone grows straight down through our parents. They are right to regard us with alarm.

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

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

Bonnie Friedman
What we learn most deeply is usually what we do not know we are learning at all. Years later, if we are lucky, we recognize the shape of what we have learned, its true anatomy.

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

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

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