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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Anything you do fully is an alone journey.

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.

Writing is the act of discovery.

Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.

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.

Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.

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.

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

keep your hand moving

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.

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...

Accept loss forever Be submissive to everything, open, listening No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge Be in love with your life

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.

You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

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.

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.

Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.

When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing.” (p.90)

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.

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.

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.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” —Natalie Goldberg

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.

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

It’s pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won’t take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

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.

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

OK, now write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, tell me what you carry.

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.

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.

And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.

When you write a memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

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.

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.

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.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page. If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

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.

We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us.

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.

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.

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.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.

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.

It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

The state of California itself was now just like me - a free-spirited liberal with a mostly sunny disposition teetering on the edge of financial ruin. (Natalie Teeger)

Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.) Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.) Lose control. Don’t think. Don’t get logical. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.

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.

My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.

Don’t worry, no one ever died of it. You might cry or laugh, but not die.

Understanding engenders care.

14294Inspiration means breathing in. Breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself and first thoughts are present.

I had to get slow and dumb (not take anything for granted) and watch and see how everything connects, how you contact your thoughts and lay them down on paper.

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.

Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop. Be as specific as possible. Slow down in your mind and go over the details of the morning.

Reach out of the deep chasm of your loneliness and express yourself to another human being.

Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.

It's a tough job being somebody's personal assistant. You have to anwser their phone, manage their correspondence, run their errands, pay their bills, arrange their schedule, and basically do whatever tasks, menial to major, they are too busy or self absorbed or distracted or pampered or disinterested to do themselves.

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.

What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that the moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who are your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? What are you looking at? Not looking at?

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.

Explore the rugged edge of thought . Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, "Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place." This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.

People often say, “I was walking along [or driving, shopping, jogging] and I had this whole poem go through my mind, but when I sat down to write it, I couldn’t get it to come out right.” I never can either. Sitting to write is another activity. Let go of walking or jogging and the poem that was born then in your mind. This is another moment. Write another poem. Perhaps secretly hope something of what you thought a while ago might come out, but let it come out however it does. Don’t force it.

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.

As writers we are always seeking support. First we should notice that we are already supported every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support. There is the sunlight coming through the window and the silence of the morning. Begin from these. Then turn to face a friend and feel how good it is when she says, “I love your work.” Believe her as you believe the floor will hold you up, the chair will let you sit.

Don’t be tossed away by your monkey mind. You say you want to do something—“I really want to be a writer”—then that little voice comes along, “but I might not make enough money as a writer.” “Oh, okay, then I won’t write.” That’s being tossed away. These little voices are constantly going to be nagging us. If you make a decision to do something, you do it. Don’t be tossed away. But part of not being tossed away is understanding your mind, not believing it so much when it comes up with all these objections and then loads you with all these insecurities and reasons not to do something.

Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write. That is painful. Writing is so simple, basic, and austere. There are no fancy gadgets to make it more attractive. Our monkey minds would much rather discuss our resistances with a friend at a lovely restaurant or go to a therapist to work out our writing blocks. We like to complicate simple tasks. There is a Zen saying: “Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.” Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.

This all happened fifteen years ago. A friend once told me: “Trust in love and it will take you where you need to go.” I want to add, “Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.” And don’t worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want. How many of us with our big salaries are actually secure anyway?

All Julie has to do is explain to her friends that she's using it to individually seal each item that she throws out." "Then they'd think she was a geek," I said. "She will thank me later," Monk said. "Why would she thank you for being considered a geek?" "Don't you know anything about teenage life?" Monk said. "It's a badge of respect." "It is?" "I was one," he said. "You don't say." "A very special one. I was crowned King of the Geeks, not once, but every single year of high school," Monk said. "It's a record that remains unbroken in my school to this day." "Were there a lot of students who wanted to be King of the Geeks?" "It's like being homecoming king, only better. You don't have to go to any dances," Monk said. "You aren't even invited.

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. It is not getting sidetracked, thinking you shouldn’t write any more about your Jewish family when that’s your role in life: to record their history, who they were in Brooklyn, on Long Island, at Miami Beach—the first generation of American Goldbergs—before it all passes and is gone.

Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting. It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned.

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.

...we live on the edge of the abstract all the time. Look at something solid in the known world: an automobile. Separate the fender, the hood, the roof, lie them on the garage floor, walk around them. Let go of the urge to reassemble the care or to pronounce fender, hood, roof. Look at them as curve, line, form. Relax the mind. Don't immediately try to make meaning or be practical. Truthfully, how practical is life anyway? All our work, and death is the final result? So let's enjoy the unfolding shape, the elemental, organic delight and agony of it all.