Margaret Bourke-White Quotes

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

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

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

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.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.

For a writer, for the solitude to write, you don't need a room of your own, you need a house.

When I write I find a quiet place.

I'm most happy when I am writing at night, because I need space and time to write.

I could type in a closet and be fine. It's just a matter of cocooning myself. Just me and the story.

I never listen to music when I'm writing.

Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.

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

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.

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

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

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

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

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 need, absolutely, to be alone.

You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.

I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.