Natalie Goldberg (born 1948) is an American popular author and speaker She is best known for a series of books which explore writing as Zen practice.
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.
Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.
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.
Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go. And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.
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.
Writing is the act of discovery.
Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.
In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.
Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.
A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.
One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.
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.
Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life
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.
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.
Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.
Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.