A Quote by Edna O'Brien

You have to be lonely to be a writer

Edna O'Brien

Quote Topics

Lonely Writer

Quote Author

Edna O'Brien
Irish - Novelist
Born: December 15, 1932

All my life I've been lonely. I've been lonely at crowded parties. I've been lonely in the middle of kissing a girl and I've been lonely at camp with hundreds of fellows around. But now I'm not lonely any more.

Betty Smith

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

Margaret Atwood

Lonely trees are not lonely; they have their eternal companies: Songs of the birds; shadows of the clouds; lights of the Moon; whispers of the winds... Lonely trees are not lonely!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

Isaac Asimov

Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.

Chuck Klosterman

The writer works in a lonely way.

Irwin Shaw

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

Alain de Botton

Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

Toni Morrison

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

Chuck Palahniuk

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

Tennessee Williams

They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.

Donald Miller

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

William Saroyan

I'm only lonely when I'm driving in my car. I'm only lonely after dark. I'm only lonely when I watch my TV. I'm only lonely occasionally.

Melissa Etheridge

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.