Natalie Goldberg Quotes - Page 5

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.

Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.

Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.

In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.

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.

I'm never ashamed to read a book twice or as many times as I want. We never expect to drink a glass of water just once in our lives. A book can be that essential, too.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

Be awake to the details around you, but don't be self-conscious.

Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.

First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.

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.

Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.

In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.

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.

Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees extraordinariness. it's not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way.

Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

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.

In a way, the cancer became an ally because it stopped me from running around so much. I was able to settle down and write things I hadn't had a chance to before.

It is simply that person's time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.

Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.

Don't let yourself be thrown away....Continue on no matter what....Continue to make a positive effort for the good.