Edna O'Brien Quotes

If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room.

My process is to be by myself when I record. It's quite an emotional performance to pull off when someone else is in the room. I prefer to go away and have my own time with it, bring it in later.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

I just always wanted to be left alone to go into a creative space.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

It's an amazing feeling to go into a studio and really be alone.

I'm a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting... it would be like somebody watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me.

I don't want a lot of people nosing round my studio and bothering me. I don't want to see them at all. Let the dealers have all that bother.

But it was important to simply be sought, even if you didn‟t ever want to be found.

There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.

Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

Few pleasures are greater than knowing you can close your door, ignore the world and create your own.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

I am private.

I feel uninhibited when I'm writing.

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'm pretty social so it's hard for me to find solitude, but I need to have solitude to write.

One constant writing ritual, no matter what I'm writing, is that I cannot write if people are around me. It wigs me out - the idea that someone is reading as I'm writing stuff.

I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.

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.

There are so many reasons why, for me, writing is superior to acting. One of them is anonymity. Writers can live relatively normal lives.

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

Isolation is a big part of songwriting.

Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.