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Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Jobs
Earth
Home
Come
Corners
Writers
Listen
Four

More quotes by Natalie Goldberg

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We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
Natalie Goldberg
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Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.
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Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh.
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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[T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.
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You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.
Natalie Goldberg
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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
Natalie Goldberg
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The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
Natalie Goldberg
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I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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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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If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.
Natalie Goldberg
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When you write, don't say, I'm going to write a poem. That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself say, I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
Natalie Goldberg
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Don't let yourself be thrown away....Continue on no matter what....Continue to make a positive effort for the good.
Natalie Goldberg
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In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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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
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg