Natalie Goldberg Quotes

Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.

Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.

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.

The only failure in writing is when you stop doing it. Then you fail yourself.

Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.

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

I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.

A writer's job is to give the reader a larger vision of the world.

keep your hand moving

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

I consider writing a legitimate Zen practice.

You don't need to go to a therapist, you don't need to do all kinds of things. If you want to write, you physically have to do it.

Understand that writing is like an athletic activity. To play tennis well, you expect to keep practicing, but for some reason with writing, you think you should come out fresh the first time.

Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.

You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.

I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life

I read Eve Ensler and thought it was fabulous. Not only that, but it was really the only thing I could relate to about cancer.

The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.

So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.

If I didn't have that, fear and projections over what was coming next could have taken over. But it was tough. Don't think I was an angel. It was hell.

I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.

Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

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.

Writers live twice.

It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.

Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)

Ninety percent of writing is about listening.

...and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.

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.

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.

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.