I've never really socialized; I've always been anti-social and preferred to be at home. I was never, even my late teens and early twenties, into clubs and parties and stuff like that.
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.
I was too shy to be around real people. It wasn't like old ladies talking to plants.
I was hiding out from the celebrity thing, I was smoking way too much [marijuana].
He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.
I'm reclusive when it comes to me giving art away because I get real sensitive about that and critiques.
It's funny because everyone says, 'Oh you're reclusive; you don't do social media,' but it's not about being reclusive. I like direct contact, and I like contact that's purposeful.
I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life.
I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.
I'm not reclusive. I'm out and about.
I don't really go out a lot. I kinda live in my own world.
I'm antisocial - there's no question about it.
After 'Traffic,' I was a total homebody. I was still a kid.
I don't really leave my house. I'm a very introverted person. I don't like going out. I don't like parties.
I'm afraid I'm still trying to find that balance. Especially now that everyone wants a piece of me. I find that I have to become more and more reclusive, and pick and choose when I am public and when I am private.
Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.
Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.
I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.
I tend to be a bit of a hermit. A bit monkish. I like to tune out the context.
I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.
A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.
He vanished to the public in order to materialize for his family.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
I am such a notorious hermit - almost pathological. And, I'm not a hoarder. But that's just a symptom of things that I do feel.
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.
