“Writing is one of the most solitary activities in the world.”
Paulo Coelho book The Zahir
Source: The Zahir
“Writing is a strange and solitary activity.”
From Nobel Lecture (2014)
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Patrick Modiano42
French writer 1945Related quotes
Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet
Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Context: I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.
Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist
Cited in: Michael Jay Quinn (2006) Ethics for the information age. p. 415
The Psychology of Computer Programming, 1971
“Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write.”
David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger
Livewire interview (2002)
Context: Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write. I didn't like writing "Heathen". There was something so ominous and final about it. It was early in the morning, the sun was rising and through the windows I could see two deer grazing down below in the field. In the distance a car was driving slowly past the reservoir and these words were just streaming out and there were tears running down my face. But I couldn't stop, they just flew out. It's an odd feeling, like something else is guiding you, although forcing your hand is more like it.
“So in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.”
Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet
Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset "On Mr Edward Howard, upon his British Princes"; cited from Geoffrey Grigson (ed.) The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 74
Misattributed
Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer
The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.
“Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Universal History of Infamy [Historia universal de la infamia] (1935) Preface