Quotes About Solitude

Once you've lost your privacy, you realize you've lost an extremely valuable thing.

There's nothing like the peace of the countryside, the quiet and the lack of distraction. It helps you to focus your mind.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Retire at various times into the solitude of your own heart, even while outwardly engaged in discussions or transactions with others, and talk to God.

Sometimes I have to run and hide. What I do at home sometimes is, I listen to a CD of the roughness of the ocean. I turn every light off, and I turn the stereo on, and I just go in my mind, cry, talk to God, tell him, 'I'm your child, too.' And I stay in my little solitude until I can get the strength to go outdoors.

When you go all over the world for work, your dream vacation is your bedroom.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.

Night time really is the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone is asleep.

That's one of the great things about creativity. You labor away in a room, and when you're writing a film, it couldn't be more of a solitary activity or a lonelier job, but if you then write a film that gets made and goes out into the world, it kind of flies away from you. It's not yours anymore.

When everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself.

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening.

In order to find yourself, who you really are, you got to be with yourself; you got to hang out with yourself.

I love the forest. It is the place where you hear yourself better.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.

In my youth, daydreaming nurtured me, provided a safe haven. I'd sleep for twelve hours and even when awake escape to the safe place in my mind.

I took four years off after 'In the Cut' because I wanted to see who I'd be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden's hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water.

The limelight is a tricky place, because you can't believe what's going on around you. You stop observing. You stop perceiving. You stop extending yourself, and you become isolated.

I think I get my alone time when I have to go fly and do a work trip. After work's done, I go check into my hotel, and I get to have a few hours to myself to order room service and just be quiet and silent.

I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.