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

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Voices
Critics
Outside
Afraid
Inside
Voice
Fear
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Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.
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The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
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One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.
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Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.
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You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
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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.
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I honor English majors. It's a dumb thing to major in. It leads nowhere. It's good to be dumb, it allows us to love something for no reason. That's the best kind of love.
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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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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 books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
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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.
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Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
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Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.
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Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.
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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.
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In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.
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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
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Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.
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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.
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I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
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As writers we need to crack open language.
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