Francois Mauriac Quotes

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.

Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

I believe there's a common ground in what all gifted writers write. It has to do with their wish to turn darkness into light.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

I write to feel alone.

All good writing comes out of aloneness.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Somebody finally has to get out an ad, often after hours. Somebody has to stare at a blank piece of paper. Probably nothing was ever more bleak. This is probably the very height of lonesomeness. He is one person and he is alone

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

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

I think loneliness comes with being creative, because you are obsessed with creation. And it is so satisfying that sometimes, I have noticed, I completely neglect my friends and my family, and they fall away.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.