Quotes About Solitude

I am a loner so I prefer traveling alone.

There are two things I love about Temescal. One is the sense of space that you get when you get to the top. You can see for ages. You can see the ocean spread out before you, but you also feel like you're in the mountains. And second is the smell of it, which I love most when I've been traveling a long time.

I don't much enjoy travelling, but I have always longed to take a slow train to Russia. I'd like to go alone - like writers do - with only a pencil and piece of paper as company. I'd take my sketchbook and note down all the wonderful details of other travellers.

I don't like travelling in groups. I like doing my own thing. I am quite a loner, actually.

I like travelling on my own. It means I'm completely free to think about what's around me.

Travelling fills me with dread.

I've spent so much of my life travelling alone, so I keep things to myself.

I've enjoyed being a single person, particularly because I'm travelling a lot. It would be hard to maintain a relationship - so I've really not tried.

Travelling alone was like laundry for my thoughts.

Whenever we have some time to ourselves I prefer to go back to my room and hit the bed. Even while travelling on a bus, I put on my sleeping hood and take a nap.

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.

Zadie Smith's 'NW' is keeping me company on my solo travels.

When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.

My anonymity is something I treasure.

I treasure my privacy.

Being on your own in a gallery is the biggest treat, as long as the lights are switched on.

Mountains are freedom. Treat them respectfully.

It's good to kind of get away from the star treatment.

Walking alone, just thinking - that's treatment, man. That's the most comforting rehab I've known.

When you're outside, and everything is highland, it's like nature has its own sound, and that's one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

I've got an image of me at the bottom of my garden sitting under my silver birch tree reading, while everyone else had gone somewhere exotic.

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

If you live in the mountains, you long for the trees and the lakes.