If every time you sat down, you expected something great, writing would always be a great disappointment. Plus that expectation would also keep you from writing.
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it.
In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books...
First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ba...
I feel that 'The Great Failure' is really a book written out of great love and a willingness to face all of who a human being is.
Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across...
Writing is 100% listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. if you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothi...
When you write a memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.
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 he...
It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to becom...
I met a doctor the other night who told me he had always wanted to be a writer. I nodded. People always tell me that...Then I thought to myself, 'You know, I've never met a writer who wanted to be any...
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.
Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it
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.
You have to let writing eat your life and follow it where it takes you. You fit into it; it doesn’t fit neatly into your life. It makes you wild.
When you draw and pay attention to what is, it's a form of being present. This inspires the mind, makes it happy, and the heart wants to express more.
TAKE A SUBJECT, a situation, a story that is hard for you to talk about, and write about it. Write slowly, evenly, in a measured way. Don’t skip over any part of it. Stay in there. It might take you s...
Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.
Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop. Be as specific as possible. Slow down in your mind and go over the details of the morning.