Quotes & Sayings About Solitude And Creativity

Sometimes you just have to turn off the lights, sit in the dark, and see what happens inside of you. — Adam Oakley

It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption. — Anthony Storr

Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product. — Twyla Tharp

Women need a space to be creative
creativity thrives in solitude. — SARK

People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can't live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory. — Karl Lagerfeld

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone. — Rollo May

As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, or birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. — Susan Cain

If this is true - if solitude is an important key to creativity - then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We'd want to teach our kids to work independently. — Susan Cain

Imagination is a spark of a divine light. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Silence leads us back to our purpose, and it ignites creativity and vision. — Angela Lynne Craig

From the outside looking in, i think my life would appear very isolated, occupying a huge empty space, with hollow-sounding, emotional echoes. But in reality, this solitary sanctuary i inhabit, allows my artistic nature to sing at the top of its lungs. My feelings have the space they need to breathe. And my art can gain the momentum, it requires, to bubble up to the surface of consciousness. For me, creativity is a chaotic and quiet hybrid, an entity that seeks a safe place to call home. — Jaeda DeWalt

To wonder is to recreate a sacred self. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled. — Kate Bolick

Creativity occurs in introverted space. Instead of considering those who seek solitude as anti-social, weird and non-team players, let's learn to respect this gift which allows us to have a self worthy of sharing. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

The holiness of solitude is the gift of creativity. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Creativity flourishes in solitude. — Pearl Zhu

The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible. — Fennel Hudson

Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest. — Mike Norton

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. — Laurie Perez

When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape. — John O'Donohue

Solitude fosters creativity. Society enhances reactivity. — Debasish Mridha

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. — Anais Nin

I never knew the wonders of nature, until I began to walk with nature. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone. — David Rakoff

How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone. — Naguib Mahfouz

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity. — Helen Waddell

Solitude is creativity's best friend, and solitude is refreshment for our souls. — Naomi Judd