Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don’t worry if it is night and your curtains are closed, or you would rather write about the light up north—just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour.

— Natalie Goldberg

There is no security no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago we will do it again. Actually every time we begin we wonder how we ever did it before.

— Natalie Goldberg

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

— Natalie Goldberg

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...

— Natalie Goldberg

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

— Natalie Goldberg

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb, and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips, so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

— Natalie Goldberg

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.

— Natalie Goldberg

What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.

— Natalie Goldberg

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.

— Natalie Goldberg

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.

— Natalie Goldberg