Quote

Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.

Natalie Goldberg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Use
Write
Anything
Writing
Shut
Anyway
Excuse

More quotes by Natalie Goldberg

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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
Image
To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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
Image
Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
Creativity is no big deal.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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
Image
Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
Natalie Goldberg
Image
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