Steven Pressfield Quotes

Exile is my power.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

Loneliness comes with life.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

Part of the gestation of 'The Wall' was this business of alienation from the audience, and so the interesting thing was, what 'The Wall' eventually became was something that absolutely engaged the audience.

I desire to know wherefore why I am banished.

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.

Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either

Only man has become an outsider - and because of his own efforts. On his own, he has separated himself from existence.

In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.