“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

“What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

“Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) Italian poet, philosopher and writer

“In solitude she lived,
And in solitude built her nest;
And in solitude, alone
Hath the Beloved guided her,
In solitude also wounded with love. ~ 35”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

“It's practically my subject, my theme: solitude and community; the weirdness and terrors of solitude: the stifling and consolations of community. Also, the consolations of solitude.”

Derek Mahon (1941) Poet

“It is astonishing that this remote solitude has been chosen for a novitiate and especially for an academy. All appearances are against it.”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

“I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

“Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.”

Witold Gombrowicz book Ferdydurke

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer