Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
I'm sure people think that I'm out in left field you know, playing by myself.
I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.
When you feel totally alone in your thoughts and feelings, there's someone out there who is going through what you went through, even if it's the strangest, weirdest thing you could think of.
I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
I still have moments when I close myself in, but I wouldn't be on the path that I am with the career that I've had if I didn't have a deep understanding of the sense of my inner freedom.
It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words.
I've lived so deep under masks, my interior was built to satisfy me alone - I have lived almost 60 years alone, mentally, and quite content to have it so.
The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves.
You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
I only hear my own voice. When you start hearing other voices, then it's time to worry.
All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.
And now it seems she's on my wavelength. That's all I need. My mind isn't much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private.
Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.
I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.
God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
I really was alone, and the only thing worse than being alone was having everyone else see how lonely you were
He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.
There's a difference between loneliness and solitude. You pursue solitude, I think. But loneliness is a completely different isolating thing.
My books often involve characters who began in some form of mental isolation, with a feeling of having died to the world. Then they become involved in some kind of action where by necessity they're forced to reengage, to get back into the game of life, as it were. You could say that about 'Chance.'
A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.
You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way.
