Natalie Goldberg Quotes

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

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.

Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it

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

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.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.

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.

Inspiration means breathing in. Breathing in God.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.

We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.