Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

She can't even chew gum and walk in a straight line let alone write a book.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end locked in your head alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar no matter what the project is.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away alone and get to work.

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

I like singer-songwriters and I find sad songs comforting rather than depressing. It makes you realise you're not alone in the world.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best but after what he alone loves at all.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

As a child I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there I wanted to make loads of money.

Writers may be disreputable incorrigible early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Others indeed may talk and write and fight about liberty and make an outward pretence to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K. but it's of no account.

The writer is all alone.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day year after year alone.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers all alone in their studios with no one watching.

I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people but I really do my best work alone and I think I would want to - if I did something again I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.

I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt which I thought was really weird because this was a long time ago and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts let alone neckties it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.

And I find - I'm 63 and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer you better like being alone.

If I want to be alone some place I can write I can read I can pray I can cry I can do whatever I want - I go to the bathroom.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone but also on trees and in the flowers and clouds and stars.