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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it”
― Natalie Goldberg

“If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Anything you do fully is an alone journey.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft

“It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bills pile up. Then you think: "Well, I'm the sensitive type. I have to express myself." Do me a favor. Don't be so sensitive. Be tough. It will get you further along when you get rejected.

Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America

“No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“keep your hand moving”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on.

I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“To encounter a fine book
and have time to read it
is a wonderful thing.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.”
― Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth

“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...”
― Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

“Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

“First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don’t wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“We heard about people who go back to their roots. That is good, but don't get stuck in the root. There is the branch, the leaf, the flower - all reaching toward the immense sky. We are many things. In Israel looking for my "roots", I realized that while I was a Jew, I was also an American, a feminist, a writer, a Buddhist. We are products of the modern era - it is our richness and our dilemma. We are not one thing. Our roots are becoming harder to dig out. Yet they are important and the ones most easy to avoid because there is often pain embedded there - that's why we left in the first place.
When I first moved to Minnesota, Jim White, a very fine poet, said to me, "Whatever you do, don't become a regional writer." Don't get caught in the trap of becoming provincial. While you write about the cows in Iowa, how they stand and bend to chew, feel compassion simultaneously for the cows in Russia, in Czechoslovakia, for their eventual death and for their flanks cooked and served in stews, in bowls and on plates, to feed people on both sides of the earth. Go into your region, but don't stop there. Let it pique your curiosity to examine and look closely at more of the world.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing.” (p.90)”
― Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg