A Quote by Anne Tyler

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

Anne Tyler

Quote Topics

Characters Companionship Get Group How How Much Imaginary Know Much Occupation Offer Once Solitary Surprised Them True Would Would Be Writing

Quote Author

Anne Tyler
American - Novelist
Born: October 25, 1941

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

Anne Tyler

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

Hilma Wolitzer

Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

Stewart O'Nan

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

William S. Burroughs

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy. Within that alternate universe, the characters do have quite a bit of free will. I know it's happening in my mind and my mind alone, but they seem to have their own ability to shape their destinies. So I'm not shooting for anything. If the characters are vulnerable it's simply because they're very human.

Bob Shacochis

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

Aimee Carter

I think you'll be surprised at how much more production you can get out of employees if you respect them, befriend them, let them know they're crucial to the company - and then show by example how important it is to put their nose to the grindstone.

Mark Schlereth

Could I see him acting as Warren Beatty directed, and what would that be like? When you see him as those characters, once you get to know him, there is so much of him in them. In fact, I saw so much of him in them that it made me laugh.

Lily Collins

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

Colum McCann

Writing is a solitary occupation.

Bernard Cornwell

Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.

Elizabeth Berg

Sometimes when I get up after writing, I'm surprised at how my body feels. Suddenly I'm not a lanky, hungry young boy any more. It's no fun putting on ten years and fifty pounds all of a sudden. Other times, I get up and I'm pleasantly surprised that I'm not a weary innkeeper, hopeless, with bones that feel like they're made of lead. I really sink into the characters that I write.

Patrick Rothfuss

Writing, by nature, is a fairly solitary occupation.

Michael Cimino

Writing is a solitary occupation, and we like it that way.

Julianne MacLean

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.

Thomas Merton

Writing is a solitary occupation; we don't really have any colleagues.

Chris Pavone

A Quote by Anne Tyler

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors