Tara Westover Quotes

This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.

The challenge is always as a writer, is this going to work, because it's a very intimate process, and I tend to be very introverted and insular, and when I write, it's in my head.

When you write, you're alone in a room. And when someone reads a book, they're alone in a room, too, usually. It's a really intimate exchange. And so people ask me where I get the boldness to talk about this or that, but I didn't feel like it required any sort of courage, because I was alone. Sometimes it feels weird for people to read it.

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.

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.

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

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

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

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.

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.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself. Publishing means going public. But the actual activity could scarcely be more invisible. And private.

Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don't exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It's a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

The more specific you are about a very general feeling of loneliness is actually how you connect with people.

I was in my early 30s, and I longed for real friendships and real relationships, and I started asking myself why I didn't have that. I had a couple of male friends, but every time I would hang out with them, it felt like there was something keeping us apart.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.

We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree.

The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy.

Face to face, just you and me, with no rules. Just like you, I get lonely too.

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

It made her eyes fill up with tears, and she for a few more minutes starting it over, replaying it, watching his lips say the words: "We can be lonely together.