Natalie Goldberg Quotes

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

I don't think events in your life affect your music.

Your music essentially reflects everything you do, everything you've been through, in the deepest part of you.

I wrote the book Don't Die, My Love as I was going through radiation, so it certainly has an air of authenticity about it because I was there. I think all of my books took on kind of a deeper tone when the lady who wrote about cancer all of a sudden had cancer. I'm doing well. I went through it all and they said, 'You're fine."

Whatever is going on in your life when you're writing has to somehow seep into your work.

All my work comes out of my life.

I usually don't write about my life right when it happens. I process it, and I store it away. Then, when I get in the mood I pull the stuff back out.

If some event happens and it seems really important to me and moving to me, I'll write it down in my lyric book knowing that it will come out in a song.

I write chronologically in my life, so whatever's going on, I write about it. Usually, that's when I feel the most cohesive body of work is formed. I got to live this crazy life, I got to write about it, and now I've got this record that I'm really proud of, too. It's not done, but when I put it out, it's gonna be good.

Anything that's really made an impact on my life, I want to get in the studio and write about it.

I began seeing certain things happen in my life and other people's lives and getting inspired by it and writing about it. And that's where you get 'Happy Birthday' from and 'Ross Capicchioni' from or you even get 'I'm Sorry' from.

'Fitoor,' in a way, signifies my journey through the years. It's a collection of 10 songs that I have written. It's basically about what I have been experiencing.

From start to finish, my experience with 'Moonlight' has been the most unique thing.

All my songs are things that have happened to me.

All my songs are based on personal experience, and 'Lost Without You' came out fully born.

In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

We truly experienced a lot as artists.

I think 'Lost Boy' is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don't picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.

When you write, what's going on in your life shines through in the songs.

When you're writing songs for yourself, as all artists do, it's about 'me.' It's about what you feel and your emotions. You're trying to get something out of your system about your experiences.

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose.