Alex Haley Quotes

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.

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.

My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.

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

On the one hand, I want to go off and live in the desert with my dog and sculpt things out of adobe.

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

There's something about the air and the sky and the atmosphere in the South of France that must be very conducive to work, to being creative, because I have written several of my books there. I find it so much easier because you're cut off. If you don't want to speak to anybody, basically they don't know where you are. And it's so beautiful.

I try to indulge my muse whenever I am able to get away from it all.

In all honesty, my favorite place to write is an anonymous, cheap hotel in a city or town where nobody knows me, the wireless service is spotty, and the adjoining gas station has coffee, beer and junk food.

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.

I'm always writing. It's kind of a curse: You never stop. But I need isolation to write. So the real meat of the material comes when I'm off the road.

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

I definitely shut down sometimes. I always just go into my own little cocoon and write, and I surround myself with as much music as possible.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I'm in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I'm Clyde. That's when everything is just settled. In the daytime it's chaotic. Everybody just goin' nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

I live alone in a house, so for me it's very good to just be able to re-charge and just disappear and escape from reality and that's usually when I write most of my lyrics and my songs. It's a very happy productive place.

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.

I love to deer hunt and fish and drive down the back roads in my truck. All those things basically equal freedom to me - and not having to return that message or call from my record company or management.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods - that's where I'm really happy.

I really love to ride my motorcycle. When I want to just get away and be by myself and clear my head, that's what I do.

Because some of my at-home life was rough and lonely, I often looked to escape into my imagination. Science fiction provided a deep well to pull from and was something easily accessible to me.

When I was five, I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

I just always wanted to be left alone to go into a creative space.

In Stratford you either turn into an alcoholic or you better write.

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.