Colson Whitehead Quotes

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

I think, as a writer, you spend most of your time working on the book alone.

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 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.

Writing is such a singular and lonely occupation. And it's interesting; all of the work that you create is so singular.

This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.

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.

The writer works in a lonely way.

So much of writing is done alone in a room in sweatpants, with only the Internet for company.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

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.

All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.

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.

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

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

Writing is a lonely business.

I suspect you've noticed that making art can be lonely.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

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.

Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.