Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 17
Context: I got into bed, opened the bottle, worked the pillow into a hard knot behind my back, took a deep breath, and sat in the dark looking out of the window. It was the first time I had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine.
“Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.”
Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Pablo Picasso 128
Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stag… 1881–1973Related quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his letter to Franz Overbeck, 2 July 1885 [original in German]
M - R, Friedrich Nietzsche
“I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”
“Inhuman solitude made of sand and God.”
"The Desert. Sinai.", Ch. 21, p. 276
Report to Greco (1965)
Context: Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man.