01c. 1948 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
02c. 1948 ADWrite what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
03c. 1948 ADWe 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 here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
04c. 1948 ADNo 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1948 ADPlay around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
06c. 1948 ADIf you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
07c. 1948 ADMy 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1948 ADWriting 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1948 ADWriters 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1948 ADNobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do itNatalie Goldberg / quote ↗
12c. 1948 ADAfter you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
13c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1948 ADIt'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 reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bills pile up. Then you think: "Well, I'm the sensitive type. I have to express myself." Do me a favor. Don't be so sensitive. Be tough. It will get you further along when you get rejected.Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
15c. 1948 ADIn 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 books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
16c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1948 ADWhat writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
18c. 1948 ADWe are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
19c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1948 ADDreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now—they just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don’t have the constraints of conscious logic.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
21c. 1948 ADOnce you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
22c. 1948 ADYou live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
23c. 1948 ADAs writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
24c. 1948 ADThe responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.Natalie Goldberg / quote ↗
