Paula Cole Quotes

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.

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

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

I think when you work alone - the way I do it, anyway - you could sort of liken it to painting, where there's sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it, putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.

Writing is a lonely process.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Blank paper has always inspired 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 throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

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.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.

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.