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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
Voice
Fear
Compost
Voices
Critics
Outside
Afraid
Inside

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I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.
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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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I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.
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I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning.
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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
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We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don’t wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.
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In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.
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Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.
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The problem is we think we exist.
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The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.
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Creativity is no big deal.
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I have students that I tell, If your book doesn't sell or you can't publish it, write another book. Quit sitting around. The publishing world is a business, but it's not any big deal. An editor is not your guru. Your agent is not your guru.
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Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.
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Understand that writing is like an athletic activity. To play tennis well, you expect to keep practicing, but for some reason with writing, you think you should come out fresh the first time.
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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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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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Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.
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