Natalie Goldberg Quotes

But 'why then publish?' There are no rewards Of fame or profit when the world grows weary. I ask in turn why do you play at cards? Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary. It occupies me to turn back regards On what I've seen or pondered, sad or cheery, And what I write I cast upon the stream To swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.

Writing has always been an incredible outlet for me to feel like I have a voice, even when sometimes I was the only one reading my work. It has been a way for me to unlock my imagination. That's when the world becomes yours, after all.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

There is no right or wrong way to tell a story. You have to find your own way. You can get your idea from listening, looking, or imagining. Stories are everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

I don't know, but I do think that everyone has a story to tell. The question is, can they find the voice and the confidence to tell it? We lack the encouragement as young people to believe this; we very often think that writing is for clever people, which it isn't.

Writing is making sense of life.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

we should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. we should write because writing is good for the soul. we should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

Just writing and being in the studio was like therapy for me.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

For me, acting was a way of releasing all of this stuff that I had inside - and a way for me to tell the stories of the people I knew, so that their spirit could live through me.

For me, writing is a parenthesis where I can make sense of life.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'