Isolation Writer Quotes & Sayings

When one chooses to be a writer, psychologically there's a reason for that because you like the isolation and you like to be by yourself and you are by nature timid. — Woody Allen

His countenance had resumed its habitual imperturbability. — Jules Verne

Hunting forces a person to endure, to master themselves, even to truly get to know the wild environment. Actually, along the way, hunting and fishing makes you fall in love with the natural world. This is why hunters so often give back by contributing to conservation. — Donald Trump Jr.

Music always came first. I never set out to be an actor. — David Soul

I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write ...
... writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone ... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror ...
... there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all ... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites ... — Robert A. Heinlein

Writing will never be perfect in a poet's eye that is why we need people's criticism good or bad, whether or not it gives a positive or negative frame to our work. We are first at hand to fight against the real and the normal in our writing as our outspoken, brimming voice bring truths to light so vividly and intensely for mass consumption that we so long for in our hearts. When the poet, not jubilant, neither spirited, allows his mind to quiet, allows the survival of and realises that all figures of speech matters; when God has witnessed the culmination of his progress; when the writer is almost in a hypnotic stance. Then the poet cannot stop himself when he is in the right place, then he can guess at the intensity, the prowess of his pen, his prolific writing and the intelligence behind his words becomes a self portrait kind of like what Vincent van Gogh used to do when he was depressed and lonely, fighting against the feelings of isolation and rejection by the establishment. — Abigail George

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ! — John Donne

Written works do not produce fast reactions as pictures and sculptures and music do. it takes no effort to see or hear. but to read - to grasp what the writer has done - requires commitment. engagement. as is the case with most art, the relationship between the maker and the audience is remote in time and space. the writer is nowhere to be seen when the reader takes up the book, or even dead. but most often, books go unread ... thus the writer, knowing this as writers do, is even more alone ... yet writers write. and knowing what they know makes their isolation almost a sacrament. — Anneli Rufus

The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. — Anne Lamott

Isolation filled with loud silence is a writer's paradise. I wonder how far north toward the Mediterranean must I travel to get there. — Terry A. O'Neal

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars! — Michael Flynn

Cancer is another forbidden or "whisper" topic. I read about a writer named Emily McDowell who said the worst part of being diagnosed with lymphoma wasn't feeling sick from chemo or losing her hair. "It was the loneliness and isolation I felt when many of my close friends and family members disappeared because they didn't know what to say, or said the absolute wrong thing without realizing it." In response, Emily created "empathy cards." I love them all but these two are my favorites, making me want to laugh and cry simultaneously. — Sheryl Sandberg

I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all, - who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you. — Laurence Sterne

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person. — Betsy Lerner

I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it. — Patrick Marber

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer. — Nelson Algren

As the environmental writer and analyst David Roberts has observed, "the ingredients of resilience" are "overlapping social and civic circles, filled with people who, by virtue of living in close proximity and sharing common spaces, know and take care of each other. The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project - it's a survival strategy."58 — Naomi Klein

I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I'm not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for attention is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress. — Masiela Lusha

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth
and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt. — Malcolm Lowry

I was doing an interview with someone who had done very interesting profiles on some of America's greatest authors, and I noticed a trend emerge. So many of America's greatest writers, J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, for example, were eccentric, reclusive types. I thought a story that showed how someone helped a great writer break through the barrier of isolation and re-enter the world would make a terrific story. It struck me that it would be even more interesting if the person who brings the writer out is someone young--a teenager, for example--who is also in some way gifted. — Mike Rich

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days
listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.) — Anne Lamott

The writing of a book may be a solitary business, it is done alone. The writer sits down with paper and pen, or typewriter, and, withdrawn from the world, tries to set down the story that is crying to be written. We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live. — Madeleine L'Engle

Let me be very clear. For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of "foreign literature"...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers. The problem is not geographic but rather numeric. In the 19th century there were at least thirty literary geniuses in Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States. Today we are lucky if there are five writers of that caliber in the whole world...Where does one find good literature today? Mostly in third world countries, because adversity, isolation, combat provide good working conditions. It is harder to be a good writer in a so-called "civilized" country, in the so-called "democracies. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you. — Ann Brashares