Brit Marling Quotes

Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

The writer works in a lonely way.

Do you know what writing a book is? It's sitting alone in a room for weeks without making contact with another human. I felt like Howard Hughes.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

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.

To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.

I would never write, ever. I might as well exile myself.

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

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing, and I'd think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating.

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.

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.

You never meet other screenwriters because it's such a lonely profession.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

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.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

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.

I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.

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.