“I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ - that wouldn’t be enough - but like a dead man.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries

“It is the writer’s ‘thing’, his glory and his prison, it is his solitude. Indifferent to society and transparent to it, a closed personal process, it is in no way the product of a choice or of a reflection on Literature.”
― Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

“Writing is impossible without some kind of exile.”
― Julia Kristeva, A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident

“The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others. That is one kind of solitude. It is the solitude of the author, of writing. To begin with, one must ask oneself what the silence surrounding one is — with practically every step one takes in a house, at every moment of the day, in every kind of light, whether light from outside or from lamps lit in daytime. This real, corporeal solitude becomes the inviolable silence of writing.”
― Marguerite Duras, Writing

“Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet’s life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.”
― Jack Spicer, After Lorca