Jon Stewart Quotes

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

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

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

Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.

Writing is a lonely job unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.

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

As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone. Unless you pick projects that are going to get you out doing things, you're not going to actually live your life.

Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.

I hate Christmas. Everything is designed for families, romance, warmth, emotion and presents, and if you have no boyfriend, no money, your mother is going out with a missing Portuguese criminal and your friends don't want to be your friend anymore, it makes you want to emigrate to a vicious Muslim regime, where at least all the women are treated like social outcasts. Anyway, I don't care. I am going to quietly read a book all weekend and listen to classical music.

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

Writing fiction is a resolutely solitary pastime, and I love being with people, so the public side of being an author is, to me, the reward for all the private time invested. And I love teaching to a fault; I have a hard time not giving away a lot of my own writing energy to my students.

I suppose the danger when you have a job that involves writing is you can be a bit isolated.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.