I drink alone. Yeah, with nobody else. You know when I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself.
I love the solitary, romantic idea of writing.
I spend a lot of time reading.
Magic's quite a solitary pursuit - a thing you can do for hours and hours, getting better and better.
I play solitaire and wait for something to happen.
The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation.
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there's some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace.
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.
Cigar smoking by it's very nature is much more reflective than interactive.
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.
Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.
You just sit home and masturbate. The phone is going to ring soon, but you just can't wait.
We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.
I was sitting in the toilet and I was by myself. I was tired of playing with the roller, so I said I'd better write a book.
Honestly, my entire childhood could be summed up with one word: Reader. I was always hunched over a book; in fact, I was the only kid in the world who got paler in the summer, because I'd sneak down into our cool, dank cellar and sit alone with a book for hours.
Golf never ceases to be a challenge, even when it really is just you and the ball out there and nobody else.
She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.
Masturbation is the thinking man's television.
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.
