Natalie Goldberg Quotes

I don't claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

I believe that the source of your inspiration is very important. I sometimes see this problem with photographers, even very good ones, who have drawn too much inspiration from photography and who, over time, have a problem forming their own identity.

One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

When I look at designer books I am sometimes puzzled why they don't share their inspiration, when it's obvious somebody had such great inspiration.

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.

I don’t believe in originality. You take inspiration from whatever moves you and you find your voice in those things.

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.

I just don't know what makes a picture, really - the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it's beautiful and another one can write it and it's dead. What the difference is, I don't know.

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.

In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

I'm a dreamer. I watch people. You don't try to become them because you could never become any of those guys. But you hope that some of it, you know, comes off on you at some point in your show, some point in your writing, that it happens to you and this light just shines on you.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

The life that I live and the experiences that I have always affect what comes out of me creatively. I think that's what makes music real.