Natalie Goldberg Quotes

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

I reached a point where I'd watched enough directors do the job that I felt I understood it. And it's not that I'm a slow learner and it took me this long; I also was enjoying writing, and I still enjoy writing - I get tremendous satisfaction out of the writing end of it.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

I want to get within myself and write. I really, really want to write.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

For years, I never really pondered how I came to be a writer from where I came from.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.

Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.