Top 200 Natalie Goldberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “This all happened fifteen years ago. A friend once told me: “Trust in love and it will take you where you need to go.” I want to add, “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. How many of us with our big salaries are actually secure anyway?”

— Natalie Goldberg

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

— Natalie Goldberg

154. “Failure is a hard word for people to take. Use the word kindness then instead. Let yourself be kind. And this kindness comes from an understanding of what it is to be a human being. Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure – just a big field to wander in.”

— Natalie Goldberg

155. “Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from that list and begin.”

— Natalie Goldberg

156. “Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.”

— Natalie Goldberg

157. “A writer’s job is to give the reader a larger vision of the world.”

— Natalie Goldberg

158. “We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.”

— Natalie Goldberg

159. “We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”

— Natalie Goldberg

160. “Visualize a place that you really love, be there, see the details. Now write about it.”

— Natalie Goldberg

161. “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

162. “OK, now write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, tell me what you carry.”

— Natalie Goldberg

163. “Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.”

— Natalie Goldberg

164. “My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.”

— Natalie Goldberg

165. “Happy?” He stared her down. “You can’t expect happiness. If it comes along – consider yourself lucky, but that’s not what life’s about.”

— Natalie Goldberg

166. “Writing is 100% listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. if you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else.”

— Natalie Goldberg

167. “It is good to pay attention to our dreams. For a period of a few weeks, write them down each morning. You don’t have to do anything else. Just write them down. They have their own magic and will bleed into your waking life. While.”

— Natalie Goldberg

168. “Write about “leaving.” Approach it any way you want. Write about your divorce, leaving the house this morning, or a friend dying.”

— Natalie Goldberg

169. “Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now – they just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don’t have the constraints of conscious logic.”

— Natalie Goldberg

170. “Reach out of the deep chasm of your loneliness and express yourself to another human being.”

— Natalie Goldberg

171. “If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.”

— Natalie Goldberg

172. “It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.”

— Natalie Goldberg

173. “We’re always thinking we should be writing no matter what else we might be doing. It’s not fun. The life of an artist isn’t easy. You’re never free unless you are doing your art.”

— Natalie Goldberg

174. “14294Inspiration means breathing in. Breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself and first thoughts are present.”

— Natalie Goldberg

175. “There is no failure – just a big field to wander in.”

— Natalie Goldberg

176. “My desolation was that no one knew me and I did not know myself. My family’s life was my life. I knew nothing else. I was clothed, fed, given a bed to sleep in, encouraged to marry early and rich, and loved in a generic way – I was “the big one,” which meant the older and my sister was the ‘little one” – but no one spoke to me, no one explained anything.”

— Natalie Goldberg

177. “It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body.”

— Natalie Goldberg

178. “We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it.”

— Natalie Goldberg

179. “Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It’s the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.”

— Natalie Goldberg

180. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

— Natalie Goldberg

181. “That dead feeling hits hard and permeates the first year. It comes back to test you often in the following years, but if you get through the first year, then you know about it. It will never have the power to defeat you again.”

— Natalie Goldberg

182. “What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that the moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who are your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? What are you looking at? Not looking at?”

— Natalie Goldberg

183. “Don’t worry, no one ever died of it. You might cry or laugh, but not die.”

— Natalie Goldberg

184. “Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should.”

— Natalie Goldberg

185. “Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration, and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs.”

— Natalie Goldberg

186. “Let some of the good writing go. Don’t worry. There’ll be lots of it over time. You can’t use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go.”

— Natalie Goldberg

187. “We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us.”

— Natalie Goldberg

188. “In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.”

— Natalie Goldberg

189. “When you write a memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.”

— Natalie Goldberg

190. “Writing became a tool I used to digest my life and understand, finally, the grace, the gratitude I could feel, not because everything was hunky-dory, but because we can use everything we are.”

— Natalie Goldberg

191. “It’s a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.”

— Natalie Goldberg

192. “A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.”

— Natalie Goldberg

193. “The terrible thing about public school is they take young children who are natural poets and storytellers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk “about it”.”

— Natalie Goldberg

194. “If you missed the mouse today, you’ll get it tomorrow. You never leave who you are. If you are a writer when writing, you are also a writer when you are cooking, sleeping, walking. And if you are a mother, a painter, a horse, a giraffe, or a carpenter, you will bring that into your writing, too.”

— Natalie Goldberg

195. “First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don’t want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don’t get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.”

— Natalie Goldberg

196. “Lighting a candle helps create a sense of magic.”

— Natalie Goldberg

197. “Writing is egalitarian; it cuts across geographic, class, gender, and racial lines.”

— Natalie Goldberg

198. “We have lived! Our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.”

— Natalie Goldberg

199. “Writing can be very lonely. Who’s going to read it, who cares about it?”

— Natalie Goldberg

200. “Suzuki Roshi once said to his Sixties American students that the way they dressed- with beads, long hair, brightly colored clothes-they all looked alike. Shave your heads, wear black robes, he said- Ah, now I can see your uniqueness. Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.”

— Natalie Goldberg