Writing Sanctuary Quotes

During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the gift of time. I can't think of anything a writer would appreciate more than being given time and space to work.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

I write at a desk. I have a room of my own where I can have my computer. I write in there, usually directly onto my computer. It used to be the room where my two sons used to sleep with the dog and the cat, but now it's all mine. It has pictures of art from my books on the walls.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

I've tried everywhere, but my garden shed is the most effective place to write.

I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.

It's hard to describe why one room and not another feels right for writing. Of course you have to train yourself to be able to write anywhere, but it's nice to feel that each book has a place that belongs to it, where it's home.

I wanted a garret hideaway to write in like Jo March in 'Little Women.'

I wanted to go to a place where I could think, really sink into my own imagination, or ride it, or drift along it, as in a balloon. The kind of place that probably all writers crave. The kind of place where the outside world is still and quiet and you get a chance to listen, to peer, to go inward

An idyllic period of my existence was when I had a den attached to my home... a writing den, and no one had access to that unless they had their own special visa, applied for weeks in advance.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

I love writing on trains. The joy of being a writer is it's all in your head; you don't need materials apart from the laptop. It's like taking your work home with you, so you can feel grounded in your own insane writerly realities wherever you are.

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

It's what every writer needs: a daybed.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

I don't have one favourite spot - I love writing anywhere that I feel inspired. I have to admit that I do love getting cosy in bed or under blankets on the sofa and writing from there.