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When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing.” (p.90)

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Wrote
Writing
Way

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Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.
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While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.
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Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
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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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We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.
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If I didn't have that, fear and projections over what was coming next could have taken over. But it was tough. Don't think I was an angel. It was hell.
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After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
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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.
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I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
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Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.
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We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.
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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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It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.
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It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.
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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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Anything we fully do is an alone journey.
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Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.
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Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life
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If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
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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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