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I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Wonder
Often
Writing
Alcoholics
Drinking
Writers
Aren
Drink

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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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You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.
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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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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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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter the act of writing does.
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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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Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it
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So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us.
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Indefinite plans get dubious results.
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Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
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Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.
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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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You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.
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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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We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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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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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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Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.
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poems are small moments of enlightenment
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