Most novelists, knowing that ongoing work is fed by ongoing life, prize their telephones, their correspondence, and their daily rubbing up against family and friends.
Carol Shields Jane Austen: A Penguin Life
It’s an intense solitude, that only a writer can understand, and it can often be excruciating, of course, but it’s absolutely necessary.
Gwen MacEwan
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
Lorraine Hansberry
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
May Sarton
Always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others.
Rainer Maria Rilke