Natalie Goldberg Quotes

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

A lot of times, you have an idea, and all the things you are thinking about might fuel it. But that's not where the idea came from.

I know it's strange, but I've always had a better time with other people's wild ideas. Coming up with my own is a deeply emotional and challenging thing to do.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

I usually just have ideas when I have them.

Sometimes when an idea flashes, you distrust it because it seems too easy. You qualify it with all kinds of evasive phrases because you’re timid about it. But often, this turns out to be the best idea of all.

I constantly have a devil on my shoulder telling me that what I'm doing is really horrible, and then somehow the lightning strike happens and everything comes together. I've just realized I have to live with that devil on my shoulder a little bit more.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Creative thought must always contain a random component.

The bad thing is that thinking about thought doesn't help at all; one has to have it from nature so that the good ideas appear before us like free children of God calling to us: Here we are.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

It's not that complicated. If you hear something and it makes you want to hear it again, that's the ticket. You have to be lucky enough to find geniuses, welcome them and get out of their way.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.

The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.

Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.

I actually don't have a great surplus of ideas. Some evolve very slowly, over many years, but I sort of trust that all of the interesting ones will become something that I eventually end up doing.