Edith Pearlman Quotes

Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.

There's nothing quite like a quiet corner in a coffee shop to gather your thoughts and begin writing.

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

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.

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.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

When I write I find a quiet place.

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.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

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.

The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.

I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

I've tried everywhere, but my garden shed is the most effective place to write.

I don't have one favourite spot - I love writing anywhere that I feel inspired. I have to admit that I do love getting cosy in bed or under blankets on the sofa and writing from there.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

There is a quiet place in Hawaii where, for over thirty years, I've gone to draw inspiration and write many of my books.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

I don't much enjoy travelling, but I have always longed to take a slow train to Russia. I'd like to go alone - like writers do - with only a pencil and piece of paper as company. I'd take my sketchbook and note down all the wonderful details of other travellers.

After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

I am in total silence when I write - I don't even like the sound of the dryer going - I like the quiet.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

I get so much inspiration from my travels, but I also started an exercise where I write down so many words every week. Then I begin crossing them off. We create a grid of words and also images, but words for me are more ample because you can interpret them your own way.