Natalie Goldberg

Writers live twice.

Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It's the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.

Begin with __ remember._ Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don__ be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.

Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don__ worry if it is night and your curtains are closed or you would rather write about the light up north__ust write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour.

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...

Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you__e free.

Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now__hey just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don__ have the constraints of conscious logic.

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.

Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.

Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.

Failure is what we're all running from, we're always running toward success with failure at our back.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind_The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.