Natalie Goldberg Quotes

Writing is like a sport. If you don't practice, you don't get any better.

The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.

Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

Writing is like a sport - you only get better if you practice

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

I do want to work on writing, because writing's a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it's intimidating as hell.

Writing is one of the few activities where quantity will inevitably make quality. The more you write, the better you're going to get at it.

But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It's like anything else. It's a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.

Writing is like anything - baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.

Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

I learned to write by writing.

Writing is a skill, not a talent, and this difference is important because a skill can be improved by practice.

You learn to write by doing it.

Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

Every story I write is different. Some are hard. Some aren't. 'Chronicle' was tremendously easy. I have a hard time comparing my process on different things, but I will say this: The more you write, the better you get at it. That's one of the few things that's markedly true.

The way you get better is putting words on the page and getting them behind you.

When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They'd be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I'd get.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised.

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

No, I have to really focus, especially when I'm writing because I wanna be good at it.

I've discovered as an author that the process of writing a novel becomes harder over time, not easier. I used to think the reverse must be true, that it would be like any task, and the more I practiced, the more adept I'd become.