Quotes About Solitude

Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

I think of the part of me that writes as the most private self. It's the part that's engaged the least with the rest of the world's needs.

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.

Writing by myself in my bedroom is definitely where I feel most creative.

Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die.

I've never met a Quadling before, she said, too loudly, too brightly. The months of solitude had made her forget her manners. My family would never have Quadlings in to dine - not that there were many, or even any for all I know, in the farmlands around my family's estate. The stories make out that Quadlings were sneaky and incapable of telling the truth. How can a Quadling to answer such a charge if a Quadling is given always to lie? He smiled at her.

To do the intellectually demanding work of writing, I leave my home office and my three beloved computer monitors to work at the wonderful old library that's just a block from my apartment. The atmosphere of a library helps me to think. When I want to take a break, instead of heading to the kitchen for a snack, I wander among the many floors of books.

A day goes by. Every shiver of grass counts. The shallows and dapples in air that give grass life are like water. The bobcat returns nightly. During easy jags of sleep the dog's dream-paws chase coyotes. I ride to the sheep. Empty sky, an absolute blue. Empty heart. Sunburned face blotches brown. Another layer of skin to peel, to meet myself again in the mirror. A plane passes overhead—probably the government trapper. I'm waving hello, but he speeds away.