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Understand that writing is like an athletic activity. To play tennis well, you expect to keep practicing, but for some reason with writing, you think you should come out fresh the first time.
Natalie Goldberg
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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
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Brooklyn
New York
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More quotes by Natalie Goldberg
You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
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
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
Wherein we discover that many of the rules for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.
Natalie Goldberg
Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.
Natalie Goldberg
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them things they can’t forget stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
Natalie Goldberg
I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
Natalie Goldberg
While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.
Natalie Goldberg
Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
Natalie Goldberg
After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
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
Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.
Natalie Goldberg
Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
Natalie Goldberg
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.
Natalie Goldberg
To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
Natalie Goldberg
Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.
Natalie Goldberg
The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
Natalie Goldberg
Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
Natalie Goldberg
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
We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do.
Natalie Goldberg
