Laird Barron Quotes

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty: he might have seen himself as in numberless avatars, in silence, doomed with motion, driven by the courage of flagged and spurred despair; by the despair of courage whose opportunities had to be flagged and spurred.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

...the sound of our lack of conversation amplified by the echo of our footsteps on the stone around us.

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, And feeds her grief.

I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.

She had the kids during the day and I would have them at night. That way they were never alone. I would put the kids to bed, and then I had nothing to do and nobody to talk to, so I would write.

Even Echo speaks not on these radiant moors.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.

There were moments when I really just thought, I don't need anything and I don't need anyone. I just want to go away and disappear.

I play in a lot of empty rooms.

That's what my music is good for - clearing out the house and being alone.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of having anything to do with — they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I shoud mention them in my writings & I find more pleasure in wandering the fields then in mixing among my silent neighbours who are insensible of everything but toiling & talking of it & that to no purpose.

I am, I said to no one there and no one heard at all, not even a chair.

And sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, Steal me awhile from mine own company.

I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

To be a musician, especially a singer-songwriter - well, you don't do that if you have a thriving social life. You do it because there's an element of alienation in your life.

Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.