Writing Isolation Quotes

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.

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

When you're a writer in Hollywood, you don't get to work with other writers. You barely get to meet other writers. We're interchangeable, disposable pieces that never really get to collaborate.

As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone. Unless you pick projects that are going to get you out doing things, you're not going to actually live your life.

I like the community of acting better than the prison of writing. I like sets.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.

Spend too much time alone with your own words, and your writing grows anemic, in dire need of a transfusion.

The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

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.

When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.

You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.

Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

I suppose the danger when you have a job that involves writing is you can be a bit isolated.

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.

I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.

I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.

The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.