Top 63 Writing Solitude Quotes
#1. When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely ... Having a big family solves that problem.
Michael Chabon
#2. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
Don DeLillo
#3. I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#4. For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.
Sue Monk Kidd
#5. Solitude and quiet are highly desirable, but the lack of them is no barrier to writing ... The will to work builds all the seclusion that one needs.
John Braine
#6. Solitude. It is way underrated in our world of writing. We stay busy. We act busy. We thrive on busy. The truth is there is a lot of beauty that lives in the solitude. Quiet is not the enemy. Quiet is necessary for brains to not self-destruct.
Bonnie Baker
#7. My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that's worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?
Charlotte Eriksson
#8. Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.
Dorothea Brande
#9. To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.
Mary Oliver
#10. There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Tobias Wolff
#11. Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don't exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It's a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.
Debi Gliori
#12. Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.
Natalie Goldberg
#13. I wish I wasn't so in love, wasn't so interested, in the Internet. I wish I spent less time online and more time outside and in my head. Writing requires solitude and deep, deep daydreaming, and the Internet just kills that - its lure is toward the external; it asks you to flit from place to place.
Edan Lepucki
#14. Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude.
Tom Robbins
#15. Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.
Anthony Marais
#16. Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#19. Letter writing allows us to be alone yet connected. We need a certain amount of solitude in order to have true ideas to communicate. But few of us desire solitude all the time ... Yet solitude is what makes us contemplative and receptive, more aware of life's gifts and our own special blessings.
Alexandra Stoddard
#20. Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.
Peter Straub
#22. Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.
Charles Bukowski
#23. I think for many songwriter/performers, you need to go off by yourself and write the songs to begin with, but then you need people to bring them to life. So you have to be comfortable with solitude and also with being very social.
Alan Licht
#24. Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.
Peter Benchley
#26. We finally realize this one day that our solitude is a blessing for us!
Avijeet Das
#27. A writer needs solitude : moments that he can spend in introspection and in reflection. These moments make him pensive and thoughtful and help him write his thoughts with clarity. A life of devotion to one's passion gives us meaning to our life.
Avijeet Das
#28. The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.
Marguerite Duras
#29. If you can't write, read.
If you can't read, walk.
Or walk and read, then write.
Joyce Rachelle
#31. I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.
Alan Hollinghurst
#32. Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.
Paul Auster
#33. I love writing, and I love the solitude of the writing, in that you're just sitting there creating something from nothing, or a new story for characters you love and care about.
John Wells
#34. Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#35. The romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.
Spencer Gordon
#36. Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
Stella Atrium
#37. If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to.
Richard Rohr
#38. Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.
George Gordon Byron
#39. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.
Don DeLillo
#40. But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve.
Mary Oliver
#41. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
#42. Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person's capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#43. The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.
Fennel Hudson
#44. I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure.
Fleur Adcock
#45. Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
#46. Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)
Virginia Woolf
#47. The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.
Keith Miller
#48. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
Wislawa Szymborska
#49. My writing method is to sit in a very small hut absolutely alone. I write in total solitude. And I write on paper, on hand, and then it gets typed. Normal for me.
Sally Potter
#50. What a writer needs?
A friend. A friend that'll accompany beside solitude itself.
Desi Puspitasari
#52. I have always enjoyed my solitude. It gives me time to think and to write.
Avijeet Das
#53. I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
Franz Kafka
#54. Writing begins as a solitary obsession and ends up as communication.
Marty Rubin
#56. The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
William Faulkner
#58. You're a loner in body, mind, and soul. A writer who spends a day of solitude in the office is plagued by a mind that travels with the body. The work never stops.
Bruce Obee
#59. This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.
only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.
Sanober Khan
#60. If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, perhaps the same things the tour buses bring people to see, but purified by solitude, if you will. In any case, do not stay in the hotel room. That is the only place you are vulnerable.
James Salter
#61. Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other
people passes by, far in the distance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#62. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
Nadine Gordimer
#63. At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.
Patrick DeWitt
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