Natalie Goldberg Quotes

Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.

Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.

I hear people say they're going to write. I ask, when? They give me vague statements. Indefinite plans get dubious results. When we're concrete about our writing time, it alleviates that thin constant feeling of anxiety that writers have - we're barbecuing hot dogs, riding a bike, sailing out in the bay, shopping for shoes, even helping a sick friend, but somewhere nervously at the periphery of our perception we know we belong somewhere else - at our desk!

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.

The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.

Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.

Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.

When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.

In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.

Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.

At the moment our rational mind stops, hits against a wall ... something else happens. And a bigger mind, like a pearl, rolls in a silver bowl.

keep your hand moving

The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.

We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.

Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak.

Writing is the act of discovery.

You don't need to go to a therapist, you don't need to do all kinds of things. If you want to write, you physically have to do it.

The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.

When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind

I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees extraordinariness. it's not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath.

Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work.

Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

There is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago, we will do it again. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before.

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.

Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.

I consider writing a legitimate Zen practice.

Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.

I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.