Barbara Pym Quotes

Do you know what writing a book is? It's sitting alone in a room for weeks without making contact with another human. I felt like Howard Hughes.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

For me, making films is about trying to work something out by myself in quite a lonely way. I find the whole thing very lonely really.

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.

I didn't have a lot of friends. I just walked around a lot and made up stories in my head. Then I'd go home and write them down. That's how I got started.

Directing is all tied up with childhood loneliness. It's such an odd thing to end up doing.

As a writer, I'm mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.

Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.

Songwriting is like talking to yourself when there is no one to talk to.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

If I am just home and writing, I become very strange.

All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.

If I'm not working, I have a habit of becoming rather insular.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

I've led a very isolated existence since I was 6 years old. It's kind of been me and my mind.

Writing is a lonely job unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn't really going out and seeing people.