Solitary Pursuit Quotes

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

After everyone's gone to bed, I still find myself sitting at the computer writing songs. It's a nice reminder that this has always been a kind of hobby that I get on with because I really love it.

In the absence of that, I am happy to play solo, but I don't think there is any comparison.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

Surfing is real private. It's a solo, loner sport.

It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.

This is a lonely sport, the more family, the more laughs, and the more fun you can have, the better. At the end of the day, though, it's one man's journey to try and be the best in the world.

Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

I write wherever I am. It helps that the writing process, for me, is a lone-wolf mission.

For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.

When one chooses to be a writer, psychologically there's a reason for that because you like the isolation and you like to be by yourself and you are by nature timid.

It's funny: I'm a lifelong musician, but because I principally play the piano it's been a solitary thing.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend

Writing is a lonely business.

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.

Writing is a lonely profession.

Writing is an incredibly lonely job.

After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening,... I asked myself why I might not be washing some golddaily, though it were only the finest particles,--why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.... At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.

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 do think you get lonelier and lonelier being an artist as you get older.

Writing is such a singular and lonely occupation. And it's interesting; all of the work that you create is so singular.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.