Tom Wolfe Quotes

I didn't have many friends; I might not have had any friends. But it all turned out good in the end, because when you aren't popular and you don't have a social life, it gives you more time to focus on your future.

Honestly, I have had to live like a high priestess in this show. It is a very, very lonely life. When you work the way I work - that means hard - there's no time for play.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Me in high school, I was kind of a loner. I had a handful of friends. I'd eat my lunch in my car every day in my senior year. I went to ballet. I was a ballerina, so I was very focused on that. You kind of have to be. That was two-thirds of my week, going to ballet class.

If I'm doing a scene that requires a lot of focus, I'll just take myself away and do what I have to do.

When I look at my own career, growing up, I was doing really well at age 11, but it was kind of isolating because back then, people weren't hanging out with me. My mom was always there. She had my back and was like, 'You keep focused. You gotta keep focused.' And I think those kinds of lessons were hard.

I spend a lot of time alone so I get a lot done. I don't do much else but work, check things out.

I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.

I think it takes a lot of desire because I think a lot of people who've never written books don't know quite how hard it is to stick with, to put in the amount of time and just make the commitment to just sit there every day and do it while everybody else is out having fun.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I worked from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night for a year to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' book.

There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.

I write mostly in my office in the shed outside at home, but it can get very cold. I write best on the train, among people. As a writer you spend so much time away from people.

I wrote 'Sophie's World' in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when I'm working on a book.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

I have been doing this since I was 10 years old. It wasn't like I was an overnight hit. I think when that happens to some actors - they just don't know what to do with themselves. You don't know how to cope with friends and all of a sudden not being able to go out. It's such a shock to your system.

When I'm writing, I separate from everyone. Even my band. I push myself, and I'm alone with my thoughts. Separating from friends and comforts and family lets you think a lot deeper about subject matter. Working alone drives me a little crazy, but it makes the writing as honest as possible.

I've spent several years now with my head down.

I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.

When I'm in the midst of finishing a book, I can be working around the clock.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.

In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that.

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.