110+ Natalie Goldberg Quotes On Writing, Creative And Insightful

Natalie Goldberg is an American author best known for her books on writing and creativity. She is the author of the best-selling book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, which has been translated into 14 languages. Her other works include Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, and Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Natalie Goldberg on writing, creative, insightful.

Top 10 Natalie Goldberg Quotes

1. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.
2. Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.
3. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.
4. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.
5. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.
6. It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.
7. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
8. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• poems are small moments of enlightenment
• The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.
• Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
• Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.
• keep your hand moving
• The only failure in writing is when you stop doing it. Then you fail yourself.
• So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.
• In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.
• I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
• Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Natalie Goldberg Quotes About Writing

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know. — Natalie Goldberg

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart. — Natalie Goldberg

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. — Natalie Goldberg

That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write. — Natalie Goldberg

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

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners. — Natalie Goldberg

I am free to write the worst junk in the world. — Natalie Goldberg

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

Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. — Natalie Goldberg

Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life. — Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg Quotes About Creative

All of us can create if we allow ourselves to. — Natalie Goldberg

Creativity is no big deal. — Natalie Goldberg

Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else. — Natalie Goldberg

A writer must say yes to life. — Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg Quotes About Truth

Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth. — Natalie Goldberg

Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth. — Natalie Goldberg

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

Natalie Goldberg Quotes About Present

You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories. — Natalie Goldberg

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. — Natalie Goldberg

Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment. — Natalie Goldberg

When you are present, the world is truly alive. — Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg Quotes About Open

We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close. — Natalie Goldberg

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open. — Natalie Goldberg

As writers we need to crack open language. — Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg Quotes About Life

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. — Natalie Goldberg

Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else. — 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

Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life — Natalie Goldberg

The harder you chase something, the faster you go and the less you're able to let life meet life. If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. — Natalie Goldberg

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. — Natalie Goldberg

Finally, if you want to write, you have to just shut up, pick up a pen, and do it. I'm sorry there are no true excuses. This is our life. Step forward. Maybe it's only for ten minutes. That's okay. To write feels better than all the excuses. — Natalie Goldberg

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters. — Natalie Goldberg

We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us. — Natalie Goldberg

I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life. — Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it. — Natalie Goldberg

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

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. — Natalie Goldberg

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down. — Natalie Goldberg

Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat. — Natalie Goldberg

If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else. — Natalie Goldberg

Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche. — Natalie Goldberg

If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you. — Natalie Goldberg

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. — Natalie Goldberg

Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands. — Natalie Goldberg

I came out with a book called The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it. — Natalie Goldberg

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good. — Natalie Goldberg

Women are wonderful, but they get so caught up about their body. We need to unhook from worrying so much. When I don't feel good, I look in the mirror and think I look fat and miserable. But when I feel good and whole, I'm not worried about my body because I'm living in it. It doesn't become an object. — Natalie Goldberg

Can we walk that thin line between constant change and continuation? And in the middle of this flux, feel gratitude but not hold on? Gratitude greases the joints to let us let go, and at the same time to stop and realize we received something. Gratitude is the most developed and mature of human emotions. — 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

And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything. — 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

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

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work. — Natalie Goldberg

The problem is we think we exist. — Natalie Goldberg

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

Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on. I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week." — Natalie Goldberg

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. — Natalie Goldberg

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder; yet we feel peaceful there. — Natalie Goldberg

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime. — Natalie Goldberg

There's no such thing as a writer's block. If you're having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity. — Natalie Goldberg

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind. — Natalie Goldberg

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

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

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

Read books. They are good for us. — Natalie Goldberg

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river. — Natalie Goldberg

Friends open the door for me to write. Then I get paid attention to and it allows me to write other books. The Great Spring and the thirtieth anniversary of Bones just came out and while I'm happy and excited about that, I've already finished a new book. That's what practice does. You don't get caught. — Natalie Goldberg

Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances. — Natalie Goldberg

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work. — Natalie Goldberg

In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry. — Natalie Goldberg

I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand. — Natalie Goldberg

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

That daydreaming seemed important at the time, but when I asked my teacher Katagiri Roshi about it, he said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work." But as for discipline, I don't even use that word. I think more about passion or love. What I've really learned is the way the mind moves, and how the mind works. Rather than discipline, I know how to seduce my mind. — Natalie Goldberg

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

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. — Natalie Goldberg

I consider writing a legitimate Zen practice. — Natalie Goldberg

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind...The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mann ered, congenial. — Natalie Goldberg

Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die. — Natalie Goldberg

At the moment our rational mind stops, hits against a wall ... something else happens. And a bigger mind, like a pearl, rolls in a silver bowl. — Natalie Goldberg

The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it. — Natalie Goldberg

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words. — Natalie Goldberg

[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

When you write, don't say, "I'm going to write a poem." That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world." — Natalie Goldberg

We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do. — 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

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

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. — Natalie Goldberg

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. — Natalie Goldberg

To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are. — Natalie Goldberg

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. — Natalie Goldberg

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure. — Natalie Goldberg

It used to be with chocolate. I would put chocolate in my studio and say, "You know, Nat, there's this chocolate you can have if you get over there." And usually if I got over there, I would start writing. Sometimes I need get out of the house and go to a café and write. Sometimes I'll write with other friends to get myself going. And sometimes I just say "Ok, Nat, enough. Go one hour. Keep your hand going." I'll do whatever it takes. — Natalie Goldberg

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

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. — Natalie Goldberg

When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind — Natalie Goldberg

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing. — Natalie Goldberg

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

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

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind. — 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

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write. — Natalie Goldberg

Life Lessons by Natalie Goldberg

1. Natalie Goldberg encourages readers to practice mindful writing and living, which teaches us to be present in the moment and to be aware of our thoughts and feelings.
2. Her work emphasizes the importance of slowing down and paying attention to the details of life, which can help us to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.
3. She also emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and the power of storytelling, which can help us to gain insight into ourselves and our lives.