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"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."
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"It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place."
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Personal Development

"People are always relying on another, i always feel more comfortable alone. Art knows my pain, its not just a desire to paint, a hobby to distract me from living my truth, it is my truth."
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Personal Development

"Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed."
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Personal Development

"Though solitude, endured too long, Bids youthful joys too soon decay, Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue, And overclouds my noon of day;When kindly thoughts that would have way, Flow back discouraged to my breast;I know there is, though far away, A home where heart and soul may rest.Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine, The warmer heart will not belie;While mirth, and truth, and friendship shineIn smiling lip and earnest eye.The ice that gathers round my heartMay there be thawed; and sweetly, then, The joys of youth, that now depart, Will come to cheer my soul again."
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Personal Development

"It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars."
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Personal Development

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with."
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Personal Development

"This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude."
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Personal Development

"A wounded heart needs aloof."
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Personal Development

"I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?"
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Personal Development

"And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own."
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"Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer."
Mind

"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."
Solitude

"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage."
Acting

"The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible."
Individuality

"To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know."
Poetry

"May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are her other four kittens."Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go."
Care

"It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat. This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought."
Life

"All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him."
Freedom

"My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people, which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company."
Loneliness

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
Mortality
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