Writing Retreat Quotes

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

There is a quiet place in Hawaii where, for over thirty years, I've gone to draw inspiration and write many of my books.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

Holiday? Is like, what? I'm a hyperactive girl, so it may be boring for me to be on the beach doing nothing. I just need to find a place for three weeks and work but sleep in the morning, maybe write a little bit, have a glass of red wine. That's my perfect holiday.

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.

All I need for a perfect holiday is sun and some peace and quiet. Those make for perfect book-writing conditions.

I have a 60-acre farm in North Carolina, and I have a tractor and a farmhouse. As soon as I groom the land, I want to put cabins around and have a place where people can write and hang out. It'll be either that or an all-black nudist colony.

A lot of what I've written that's made its way onto my records I've written in Kansas, which is interesting because I've never written about Kansas. But I go have these experiences. and I'll be back at my parents house, and it's like I'm in a safe incubator.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

I usually do my writing in a very nice room, my studio, which is in the attic of our house in Wisconsin. But the nice thing about writing is that I can do it in many places. So sometimes I'll write in coffee shops.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do but either walk around or read a book or work on your book, and they all seem helpful.

I wrote in the cellar for a number of years. I needed a private space, and it had a furnace, so it was always warm.

The first few months of my life of every year are in total retreat. I don't see anybody except my husband and my dog, I don't talk to anybody, and I just write.

Everything I write, I've written the first draft in Austria.

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.

And I sit in my jacuzzi with my script.

For a writer, for the solitude to write, you don't need a room of your own, you need a house.

I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.

During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the gift of time. I can't think of anything a writer would appreciate more than being given time and space to work.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.

I lock myself up in the apartment when I am writing a script. There's no phone, no Wi-Fi, no distractions whatsoever.