Quotes About Isolation

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.

The writer is all alone.

The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.

I think film and television - particularly film - you are very isolated as a writer. If you're lucky, you have a good relationship with the director. Then you do make that development and come on set and be part of something. But ultimately, your work is kind of done by the time you come on set.

I don't think that talking to anybody can help you - a writer or a nonwriter. So what do I do in Wisconsin? I don't know. I just slug through it.

I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

I was painfully shy, and I had tremendous difficulty making friends. So, lacking friends, I watched other people. Watching is something all writers must do, and it was in junior high that I learned to do it.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write.

Many of the writers I admire - Melville, Dickinson, Kafka - were virtually invisible during their lifetimes. Art, I think, often has to dance around in the void.

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.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

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

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.

As is said about most writers, on the one hand, all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing. On the other hand, the more I read, the more I felt this well-known fissure between me and the world.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

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

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.