Creative Retreat Quotes

I've retreated to what I was originally, which is an individual songwriter.

The whole race of scribblers flies from the town and yearns for country life.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

I've never quite worked out how to do holidays. I've got a house in France which I suppose is a kind of holiday house. But it's really only so I can go on drawing when I get there. I'm never far away from the feeling that I want to be getting on with something.

There's one little room in my house which is filled with all my clutter and bits and pieces. My sewing machine is up there, and all my knitting stuff. Its a place where I can go to relax and unwind. I don't get to spend a lot of time up there, but at least I know its there.

I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den.

I wanted a garret hideaway to write in like Jo March in 'Little Women.'

I've turned my guest house into this little studio, and we have actors come over and do readings.

I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots.

I wish one time in my life I could do what other writers do... get me a villa in Spain and go there to write a book.