
“Utter loneliness was planted in me then, and sent its deep roots down into me.”
Source: Assassin's Apprentice
New York Times (2 June 1969)
“Utter loneliness was planted in me then, and sent its deep roots down into me.”
Source: Assassin's Apprentice
“A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.”
“He was Himself forsaken that none of His children might ever need to utter His cry of loneliness.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 73.
Source: Dr. Heidenhoff's Process http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7052/7052-h/7052-h.htm (1880), Ch. 2.
"The Shadowland of Dreams"', published in Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (1996) by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Maida Rogerson, Martin Rutte and Tim Clauss; also in Alex Haley : The Man Who Traced America's Roots (2007), a collection of stories and essays by Haley published in Reader's Digest between 1954 to 1991.
Context: Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there’s a big difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.
“Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry…”
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)
“Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.”
Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121
"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)