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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
First
Students
Writing
Stay
Things
Lose
Loses
Control
Break

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The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
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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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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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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.
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Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.
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Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.
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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 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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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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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 is simply that person's time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.
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Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.
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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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Don't let yourself be thrown away....Continue on no matter what....Continue to make a positive effort for the good.
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Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.
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Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.
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The problem is we think we exist.
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Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.
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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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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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