Quotes by Natalie Goldberg

“Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably thats why we decide were done. Its getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.”

“Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.”

“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.”

“We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”

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

“When you are present, the world is truly alive.”

“Its the process of writing and life that matters... We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.”

“Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.”

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - dont 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...

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 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 doesnt 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 Kemps half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writers 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.

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 cant 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. Its the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.

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 afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. Thats 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. Thats what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone elses skin.

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.