Natalie Goldberg Quotes

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

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

Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back. And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

I like writing and directing. I enjoy telling stories, and I think it's born in a comedian to end up directing.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

I write about the things that haunt or obsess me.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I love the freedom of writing and then I love the realization of directing. I can't favor one or the other. I enjoy both parts of the process.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.