Saul Bellow Quotes

Writing can be really lonely, and I find that bit difficult. I'd rather be around my people, getting ideas.

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

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.

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.

Artists walk alone.

Isolation is a big part of songwriting.

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

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

When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.

I didn't have a lot of friends. I just walked around a lot and made up stories in my head. Then I'd go home and write them down. That's how I got started.

I've always believed that as an artist, as a writer, you need a lot of contact with other people to make your art good.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

As a writer, you have to be near people and hear stuff. I'm a hamburger and cheese kind of fellow; I'm not Henry David Thoreau.

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

Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.

Here is the infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.

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

You have to be lonely to be a writer

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.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.

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.

Do you know what writing a book is? It's sitting alone in a room for weeks without making contact with another human. I felt like Howard Hughes.