Tama Janowitz Quotes

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

To be a musician, especially a singer-songwriter - well, you don't do that if you have a thriving social life. You do it because there's an element of alienation in your life.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

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.

My process is to be by myself when I record. It's quite an emotional performance to pull off when someone else is in the room. I prefer to go away and have my own time with it, bring it in later.

The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

Composing demands a degree of isolation.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

Writing songs is super intimate. It's a bit like getting naked.

Honestly, I find writing to be a very lonely job.

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

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

I love doing sketches, but I don't relish being by myself. That's not something I'm used to doing.

I used to be locked up in my bedroom for hours, just listening to music, making some of my own, doodling and writing poetry.

Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.