Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.
I have a sort of Catholic-slash-Calvinist view of human nature, but every day I meet somebody who is doing cool things. So people get you out of your solitude and do things that exceed your expectations every day.
Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
I had to learn - since I'm divorced now and everyone is like, 'Oh my God, you're single, what's going on?' - that if I don't like to spend time with myself, how can I ask someone else to enjoy spending time with me? I'm getting to learn how to enjoy my solitude and have a good time.
Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.
The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.
Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.
Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.
It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
But the delights of solitude don't only consist of dreaming. Next in enjoyment, I think, comes planning.
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
There's a difference between solitude and loneliness.
Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Solitude is better than the society of evil persons.
The myth of my solitude makes me laugh.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.
Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
I don't mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space.
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.
Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.
I like solitude. I'm very good at being disconnected. I do a lot of disappearing. People who know me go, 'Oh yeah, Mailman, she's gone into her cave again.' I'm like that, a bit of a hibernating bear. Like that crocodile that just sits there in the water and doesn't do much. I was always a bit of a dreamer as a kid, so that hasn't changed.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.