Quotes About Solitude

People don't do me much good.

I just want a hot cup of coffee,black,and I don't want to hear about your troubles.

they simply never understand, do they, that sometimes solitude is one of the most beautiful things on earth?

As a recluse I couldn't bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.

the best part was pulling down the shades stuffing the doorbell with rags putting the phone in the refrigerator and going to bed for 3 or 4 days. and the next best part was nobody ever missed me.

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.

It was the first time i had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

It was like a church in there as only the truly lost sit in bars on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m.

she slammed the door and was gone. I looked at the closed door and at the doorknob and strangely I didn't feel alone.

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.

we sat there smoking cigarettes at 5 in the morning.

No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing.

show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 times out of 9 I'll show you an exceptional man. show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.

too often, the only escape is sleep

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.

it is good to be sitting some place in public at 2:30 in the afternoon without getting the flesh ripped from your bones.

if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

I got up and walked back to my roominghouse. The moonlight was bright. My footsteps echoed in the empty street and it sounded as if somebody was following me, I looked around. I was mistaken. I was quite alone.

in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.

Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.

The greatest men are the most alone.