Wild Mind Quotes

“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

“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 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

“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

“Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“LIFE IS NOT ORDERLY. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“When you write a memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“I met a doctor the other night who told me he had always wanted to be a writer. I nodded. People always tell me that...Then I thought to myself, 'You know, I've never met a writer who wanted to be anything else. They might bitch about something they're writing or about their poverty, but they never say they want to quit...and if they do abandon it they become crazy, drunk or suicidal.' Writing is elemental.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“You have to let writing eat your life and follow it where it takes you. You fit into it; it doesn’t fit neatly into your life. It makes you wild.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Don’t worry, no one ever died of it. You might cry or laugh, but not die.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Let some of the good writing go. Don’t worry. There’ll be lots of it over time. You can’t use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“I'm sorry I don't have brilliant reasons for beginning a novel. As you go along, you make up reasons to do what you want. There's an open space. Enter it.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“do all my original writing by hand. I have greater mobility: I can write on planes, with friends in cafés. Plus it feels more connected with my body; my hand moves with my arm and shoulder, which is connected to my chest and heart. All good writing comes from the body and is a physical experience.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Failure is a hard word for people to take. Use the word kindness then instead. Let yourself be kind. And this kindness comes from an understanding of what it is to be a human being. Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure—just a big field to wander in.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Style requires digesting who we are.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“I cannot say why, but the simple act of reading it aloud allows you to let go of it. Do not forget this. Believe me, it helps. At first it is a very scary thing to do.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“this quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning. We should not be ashamed of this. It is good. It's like drinking water; we don't drink a glass once and never have to drink one again. We don't finish one poem or novel and never have to write one again. Over and over, we begin. This is good. This is kindness. We don't forget our roots.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“the artist and the alcoholic have parallel paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artist (if she is not also addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“That dead feeling hits hard and permeates the first year. It comes back to test you often in the following years, but if you get through the first year, then you know about it. It will never have the power to defeat you again.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“It is good to pay attention to our dreams. For a period of a few weeks, write them down each morning. You don’t have to do anything else. Just write them down. They have their own magic and will bleed into your waking life. While”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“SIT DOWN WITH THE plan to write something you have always wanted to write but have never managed to get around to. This time, though, you are not timing yourself. You are sitting down with the determination to write it through, even if it takes all afternoon or night. Relax and ease into it. Promise yourself you’ll burn through, put the real stuff down, and not get in your own way.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“WRITE EVERYTHING YOU know about dying. Just go. Don’t think, “What does she mean by that?” Dive in. We die in all kinds of ways. Who died? When did they die? how? why?”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“the back of every word we write is no word. Only because no word exists is there space enough to write some word. So when we write about our feelings and perceptions, it is writing practice when we also touch the place where there are no feelings, no perceptions, there is no you, no person doing any writing. In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“TAKE A SUBJECT, a situation, a story that is hard for you to talk about, and write about it. Write slowly, evenly, in a measured way. Don’t skip over any part of it. Stay in there. It might take you several days, a week, a month to write out the whole thing. Continue to work on it every day until it is finished.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“There is no failure—just a big field to wander in.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“AT THE TOP OF the page, jot down the name of a river you know, a color, a city, a street, a fruit, a month, a job. Now do a ten-minute timed writing, telling about the first time you made love, but as you write, you must include the above list in there some place. Just grab the words from your list helter-skelter as you go along.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“WRITE ABOUT TOWNS AND cities you have passed through and places you stayed in a week or less. Write about a car trip. Go. Write about trains. Go. Write about a hotel you stayed in. Go. Make up twenty of your own travel topics. Explore different dimensions of your travels.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life