Nicolas Berggruen Quotes

I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

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.

We lived in Atlanta for a couple of years, and had a lot of fun, but my best work happens when I isolate myself. It's all about turning inward.

You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.

All my day is spent dealing with other people. When I come home I like it to be empty. The presence of others in my house kind of annoys me. I love coming home and shutting the doors. I feel brain dead. I'm relatively available, but not to live with.

I like semi-torn-down places where I could get nestled in and get something done without anyone bothering me.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.

Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.

Sunday is the one day I keep reminding myself that I should lay around and take it easy, but because I am O.C.D. and an extreme multitasker, I find it hard to get lazy. I love Sundays for painting because it's quieter; the gallery is closed, and there are no interruptions.

My sister is older than me and would often go off, so I grew up alone in a sense. I had to amuse myself and developed a wonderful fantasy world and quite happily lived in it. I think, in adulthood, that helped me. I love pottering on my own.

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have.

Honestly, I find writing to be a very lonely job.

I like my surroundings to be pretty spare and severe. It helps me to concentrate on my work. All I ever do here is go from my studio to my bedroom. Everything else is extraneous. I never entertain, because to me, New York is about meeting people in public spaces, absorbing a little bit of their energy.

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.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

I really do work in solitude.

I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.

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

I work in silence.

I write to feel alone.