Mac DeMarco Quotes

All good writing comes out of aloneness.

I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.

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 just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

You've probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike.

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.

I didn't have a lot of friends. I just walked around a lot and made up stories in my head. Then I'd go home and write them down. That's how I got started.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

As a writer, I'm mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

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

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

My life revolves around my writing, my wife and my son.

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

Writing is a lonely business.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.