Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.
Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it
After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
I don’t think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
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.
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.
Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now—they just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don’t have the constraints of conscious logic.
Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.
You live and then you die, I thought. It’s good to have some good times.
The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.
Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.
It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.
Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)
I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
…and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.
Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so right in the middle of it we die lose a leg fall in love drop a jar of applesauce.
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.
Failure is what we’re all running from, we’re always running toward success with failure at our back.
Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There’s something about holding that richness.
Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.
Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.
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.