Quotes by 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 ...”

“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 g...”

“Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are nowthey just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They dont have the constraints of conscious l...”

“Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and youre free.”

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

“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...”

“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 ref...”

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

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

“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.”

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”

“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 ...”

“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 th...”

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

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

“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 woma...”

“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 ...”

“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 bo...”

“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 ou...”

“What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mindThe mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to thi...”