Natalie Goldberg Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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
The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.

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
Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak.

Natalie Goldberg
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. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder; yet we feel peaceful there.

Natalie Goldberg
It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.

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

Natalie Goldberg
We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning.

Natalie Goldberg
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.

Natalie Goldberg
There is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago, we will do it again. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before.

Natalie Goldberg
That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.

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

Natalie Goldberg