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Indefinite plans get dubious results.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Indefinite
Dubious
Planning
Plans
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More quotes by Natalie Goldberg

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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
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poems are small moments of enlightenment
Natalie Goldberg
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Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.
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 correctness and quality of what you write do not matter the act of writing does.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
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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I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
Natalie Goldberg
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Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.
Natalie Goldberg
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Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.
Natalie Goldberg
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I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.
Natalie Goldberg
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Creativity is no big deal.
Natalie Goldberg
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Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.
Natalie Goldberg
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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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In the West, a teacher imparts knowledge to a student. In the East, a teacher transmits nothing more or less than his or her Being.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
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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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
Natalie Goldberg