Quotes By Author: 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.”

“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-mannered, congenial.”

“Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.”

“Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it”

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”

“My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.”

“No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can’t write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet. I tease the class, “Pay no mind. It’s the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.”