Goldberg Quotes

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

I am where I am because I believe in all possibilities.

I am a human Rube Goldberg machine," he said. "I do simple things in complicated ways

This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.

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

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

I watched him spread out his arms with a smile before he crashed through the table in a beautiful crescendo, the glass sounding like tinkles from a piano as its shavings glittered across the floor and sliced through his face and body.

The ability to keep your mouth shut is usually a sign of intelligence

We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.

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.

When you care about other people, it takes the spotlight off your own drama.

I don't have pet peeves like some people. I have whole kennels of irritation.

For someone grieving, moving forward is the challenge. Because after extreme loss, you want to go back.

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

Everything is so fast and awful, isn't it, Noah?" "The world has become like that.

It's possible that all labels are curses. Unless they are on cleaning products.

The real horror of my life is not that I’ve killed some terrible people. The real horror is that the people I’ve loved didn’t love me back.

books=comfort

We all get our hearts broken. We get fucked up and throw up and we cry and listen to sad songs and say we’re never doing that again. But to be alive is to do it again. To love is to risk everything

The music grew louder, faster, as we saw an empty couch on the balcony and ran to get it, pushed aside another couple darting for the same thing, but it was ours, and we smiled wide, laughing at our fortune, our couch.

And endings are always the beginnings of something else.

Hollywood is bigger down right now by sequels, by the uninspired. Well, my M.O. is a two-hour feast for your senses. That means starting the concept of filmmaking from scratch, making it your own.

A second can feel like forever if what follows is heartbreak.

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

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.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

Under the lake by Anvil Creek, a man has been frozen much like another man in the same wilderness had been frozen, in this area of Alaska where silence is the loudest sound.

I wanted solitude, but a treasure like that didn't exist in the city. I only found silence in Central Park, still littered with people of course, but the only place that held moments of calm. I breathed in that wonderful silence as my pace finally slowed, and nature delighted my senses.

The heater spits a chorus of steam, his bones no longer brittle and cold. The ice man melted, a new form waiting to emerge once all the crystals get shaken away.

And just being there is ninety-nine percent of what matters when your world falls apart

There should be multiple yous," Grayson says, outlined by the moonlight, a blue phantasm. "So you can help solve all of our problems. So you can help solve the world's problems.

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.

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.

I don't want to know how you did it. I want to believe you are magic.

As I’ve learned from life, happiness sometimes only greets us in fits and starts. For tragedy often follows merriment. Without strife, we would not know the true meaning of gaiety. That’s what I like to tell myself to ease the pain.

Every person has lots of ingredients to make them into what is always a one-of-a-kind creation.

His eyes swelling with tears, the alien salt stinging. Not tears of sadness, this he decides. He won't let them be anything more than a body's way of letting go.

[T]he deepest form of pain comes out as silence.

maybe that happens when you've been through a lot. all of your edges are worn off, like sea glass. either that, or you shatter.

People can drift far away from themselves but eventually tether again.

Normal is just a cycle on the washing machine.

Love is kind, love is patient but also, mainly, above all—yes—Love is perverted.

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

Anything you do fully is an alone journey.

The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.

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.

She is like me. Silent. I admire that in a person. The ability to keep your mouth shut is usually a sign of intelligence. Introspection requires you to think and analyze. It's hard to do that when you are blabbing away.

All reality is a blender where hopes and dreams are mixed with fear and despair.

Writing is the act of discovery.

I'll be ready. I'm not sure for what exactly. But maybe that's what being ready really means.

Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.

I'm putting my place in the universe into perspective. I'm stardust. I'm golden brown. I'm just one small bit in a vast expanse.

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.

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.

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

I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.

Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.

She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.

if you're lost you might need to swim against the tide

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.

It has been my experience that rewarding and heartbreaking often go hand in hand.

I'm not brave; it's just that all other choices have been thrown out the window.

I don't make threats," she said. "I make reality.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

I licked my lips where I could still taste their glove's fabric. Bitter leather and sweat. The taste of being alive.

I screamed at them all to leave me alone, begged for their mercy, but they feasted until I was picked clean like a carrion would.

keep your hand moving

Every person has lots of ingredients to make them what is always a one-in-a-kind creation. We are all imperfect genetic stews.

What we expect rarely occurs; what we don't expect is what happens.

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.

It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.

With the right combination of Long Island blue heavens swimming in my bloodstream, I could be perfection.

I am being watched. My stalker is smart, just like I would be.

The two stalkers who had finally found one another. Watching each other all night until we collapsed from exhaustion.

I'd leave all my haters in my motherfucking dust.

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.

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

poems are small moments of enlightenment

I hoofed it out of the alley, returned aboveground. Collided with people as I tore down the street, running fast as I could, chasing demons I would never catch.

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.

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.

If that was the last time we met, I was satisfied with my parting words. But if that was the case, why was I crying on the way back to the train as if I'd experienced a death?

There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word cozy. That's why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grand kids pajamas and bathrobes.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

She said that I was highly gifted. Are people lowly gifted? Or medium gifted? Or just gifted? It's possible that all labels are curses. Unless they're on cleaning products. In my opinion, it's not really a great idea to see people as just one thing.

A genius shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it.

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...

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

Happiness is an illusion, Natalie. It doesn't actually exist." "Of course it does," I said. "It's what you feel when you're not sad." "That's unconsciousness. And I'm pretty sure that I'm miserable when I am unconscious, too.

Now, I've always known that there were bullies in the world. We've seen a lot of it in politics lately as well as in daily life. You see it where people who may be stronger, or bigger, or better with verbiage than other folks... show off. To me, that's what bullying is, showing off. It's saying, I'm better than you, I can take you down. Not just physically, but emotionally.

Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had to stop him from arresting an old lady who let her dog urinate against the fire hydrant that was in front of Burgerville headquarters. "You'll blow our cover." "But what if there is a fire?" "The fire department will come and put it out," I said. "With what?" "Water," I said. "Not from that hydrant," Monk said. "It's inoperable." "No, it's not," I said. "It can still be used." "There is urine all over it," Monk said. "no fireman would dare touch it, nor would any other human being." "Firefighters run into burning buildings," I said."They aren't going to care about some dog pee on a fire hydrant." "They would if they knew," Monk said. "We should call and warn them. Call Joe right now. He can get the word out faster than we can." "Every fire hydrant in the city has dog pee on it, Mr. Monk. It's how dogs mark their territory. I can guarantee you that every male dog that has passed that hydrant has pissed on it." He looked at me, wide eyed, "No." "It's what dogs do," I said. "The firefighters knows this." Monk swallowed hard. "And they still use the hydrants?" "Of course they do." "They are the bravest men on earth," Monk said solemnly.