Natalie Goldberg Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Natalie Goldberg
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
Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

Natalie Goldberg
Can we walk that thin line between constant change and continuation? And in the middle of this flux, feel gratitude but not hold on? Gratitude greases the joints to let us let go, and at the same time to stop and realize we received something. Gratitude is the most developed and mature of human emotions.

Natalie Goldberg
First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.

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

Natalie Goldberg
When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind.

Natalie Goldberg
The only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.

Natalie Goldberg
Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.

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

Natalie Goldberg
Even an ice cream parlor—a definite advantage—does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.

Natalie Goldberg
One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

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

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
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
Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

Natalie Goldberg
I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

Natalie Goldberg
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
If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

Natalie Goldberg
I'm never ashamed to read a book twice or as many times as I want. We never expect to drink a glass of water just once in our lives. A book can be that essential, too.

Natalie Goldberg
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.

Natalie Goldberg
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
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.

Natalie Goldberg
Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.

Natalie Goldberg