Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

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

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“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

“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, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless...”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it”
― 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, Writing Down the Bones

“Anything you do fully is an alone journey.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“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, Writing Down the Bones

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

“Keep your hand moving.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“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, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

“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, Wild Mind

“Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Writing is the act of discovery.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America

“I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life