Solitary Work Quotes

Most of my work is done when everyone else is asleep.

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.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

Nothing's harder than writing. There's no comparison. With directing, you can bounce a lot of ideas around. There's tremendous support - you've got editors and sound mixers. With writing, it's all you, and it's just crippling when people tear up your pages.

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.

My two bits here are that writing is a solitary job but there are times when one needs to discuss the work, and see what's working and what's not.

My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around.

I'm such a solitary person that working on my own is perfect for me.

Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.

Lots of creativity is and should be solitary.

I like stand-up. But I'd also like a family and house and a yard. I want to work with a lot of people, have colleagues; and on good film sets, there's people there that work with the same people for years and years. I love that collaborative spirit in that medium. Comedy is a lot more solitary.

I had always assumed that the right way to do it was to these engineers, put them in offices by themselves with doors that they could close so they could think deep thoughts. This is a terrible idea.

Nothing is more satisfying to me than sitting in a dank room, hunched over a single flickering candle like Ebenezer Scrooge, and watching my ledgers fill themselves with ink.

In a sense, being a full-time writer is less fun because there's no office to go to anymore, there's no set routine, there's no schedule. It can be quite isolating.

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

Artists work best alone. Work alone.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

I do love writing but it is a lonely profession. You're lonely and optimistic at the same time.

I'm better suited to be a director, I think. I see myself as the general author. I hate the word 'auteur,' because it sounds so solitary when filmmaking is anything but solitary.

Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.