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.