Tony Parsons Quotes

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.

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.

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

As a writer, I'm mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

I still feel like I'm alone at times - even if I'm in the midst of a million people. Because no one - including me - understands my mind creatively. I haven't really been formally introduced to my gift yet. I feel like I'm still on the runway.

Writers are often alone when they work. Hours pass in silence as one long moment; light fades as day turns back to face the coming night.

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.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

It's better to be healthy alone than sick with someone else.

He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.

If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.

I think that's why often people in creative fields can feel so alone is because there's a constant third eye, that constant watcher.

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

Artists walk alone.

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

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.