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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.

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

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We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
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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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Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
Natalie Goldberg
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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
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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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Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.
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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.
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[T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.
Natalie Goldberg
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We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.
Natalie Goldberg
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As writers we need to crack open language.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
Natalie Goldberg
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In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.
Natalie Goldberg
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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
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It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.
Natalie Goldberg
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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.
Natalie Goldberg
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Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.
Natalie Goldberg
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I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
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I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.
Natalie Goldberg