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When you write what you know, you stay in control. One of the first things I encourage my writing students to do is to lose control - say what they want to say, break structure.
Natalie Goldberg
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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Write
Encourage
Firsts
Structure
Students
First
Stay
Writing
Lose
Things
Loses
Control
Break
More quotes by Natalie Goldberg
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.
Natalie Goldberg
The harder you chase something, the faster you go and the less you're able to let life meet life. If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down.
Natalie Goldberg
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
Anything we fully do is an alone journey.
Natalie Goldberg
Creativity is no big deal.
Natalie Goldberg
Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.
Natalie Goldberg
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
Natalie Goldberg
When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
Natalie Goldberg
There is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago, we will do it again. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before.
Natalie Goldberg
We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do.
Natalie Goldberg
I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
Natalie Goldberg
I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
Natalie Goldberg
It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.
Natalie Goldberg
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.
Natalie Goldberg
I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
Natalie Goldberg
One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.
Natalie Goldberg
First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.
Natalie Goldberg
You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
Natalie Goldberg
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.
Natalie Goldberg
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
