Quote

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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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Writing
Clarity
Kind
Writers
Something
Especially
World
Relationship
Worst
Someone
Secretly
Also
Writes
Great
Jealous

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Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.
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I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.
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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.
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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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When you bring the darkness to the table, it doesn't rule you or hurt other people, but when we keep it secret, it's dangerous.
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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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We should notice that we are already supported at every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support.
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I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
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You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
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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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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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I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.
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We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do.
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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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Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life
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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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One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.
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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.
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